Published: 2025-08-18
A form "functions freely" when its variability is secured by rules. According to Carpo, parametric freedom is not arbitrariness but modular governance. Failures or bugs are not detours but observatories. When triaging bugs as potential features, scale becomes a disciplined conversion of admissible exceptions as the rule. The publication of shared syntaxes enables critique and reuse while on-premise guidelines dictate semantics. Freedom, in praxis, is protocol.
A form "functions freely" when its variability is secured by rules. That is Mario Carpo's point: parametric freedom is not arbitrariness; it is sovereign because constraints are explicit, computable, and reproducible. Hence, the corollary: when breakdown makes the tool visible, emerge the rules that kept the form intact. Every "bug" must be treated as an observatory base and a decision point.
A form functions freely if and only if, for all parameters satisfying a set of explicit and testable constraints, also preserves its invariants. Bugs are demonstrable observations of the incompleteness of a given set of parameters or its invariants. Bug-resolution implies refining one's constraints or its invariants, thereby recalibrating one's parameters - as a feature.
In conversational exchanges, freedom is perceived as the absence of restraint. In technical practice, the standardisation of deviations under known limits, is freedom. If a system lacks constraints, it is noise; if anything and everything is a constraint, it ossifies. The form, and therefore, function, is to formulate enough rules to allow functional overriding of protocols.
Carpo's freely-functioning-forms transcend architecture itself: rules liberate because protocols protect. The difference between a successful moonshot and a fistfight is merely procedural: bureaucratic-legal forms that convert relegations into Generals. Architects and engineers are already attuned to this paradox, structurally.
The phrases "forkable syntax" and "proprietary semantics" are not charity but governance. Published repositories invite reuse and hence, critique. Encoding invariants to address operational needs is taking ownership of one's system and subsequently reaping its rewards. This distinction allows a publication to function without surrendering its form.
For operators on the field, this form of governance is most felt through its reproducibility. A feature's realness is measured by the stability of its interface, the capabilities of their invariants, and the availability of fallbacks. For users of any such function-as-a-service, governance emerges as localisation, wherein the system garners trust by disclosure of its limits.
For teams outside Carpo's domain, this is how architecture translates. A design is not just a 2-dimensional blueprints sketched to geometric precision but a grammar of mechanically-enforced set of admissible transformations. Whether one runs a pickup and delivery route, or manages a peer-to-peer message board, or even a research campaign operating via the internet, scale is not achieved by isolating exceptions. Turning expectations into new rules that can be enforced is how one scales, sovereignly.
Carpo's "freely functioning form" is disciplined variability: protocols that traverse the same networks a form embeds to preserve its self-governing functions. Publishing the repository on a public platform makes the form freely available; encoding proprietary invariants makes the form function freely. Shared syntaxes via deterministic fallbacks yield sovereign semantics. Bugs reveal features.
Carpo, Mario. The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence. MIT Press, 2017.