Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Let’s Talk About Appropriation, Baby

My friend and co-author Jeff posed an inter­est­ing ques­tion a few days ago, about what he calls design “appropriation”—the main ques­tion being, essen­tially, if part of the learn­ing process of design is to learn from the works of oth­ers, and if incor­po­rat­ing those styles and pat­terns of design is part of a design­ers evo­lu­tion, then where (or even how) do we draw the line between accept­able influ­ence and rip­ping some­one off?

“You might call it remix­ing or influ­ence, or you might refer to it as theft, rip-off, or copy­right infringement.”

Jeff’s par­al­lels between jazz are a ter­rific start­ing point, but the big dif­fer­ence between jazz (or any music for that mat­ter) and design is that (judg­ing by many of the com­ments on his post) many peo­ple can’t make the two relate: music is art (even when done for profit), and design isn’t art.

So, while as a musi­cian (jazz and all sorts of other styles) I get Jeff’s point, and I see and expe­ri­ence it with the music I lis­ten to (the Verve Remixed series is a per­fect exam­ple of sam­pling in this man­ner), I think com­par­ing the issue to prod­uct designs will make things even more clear (assum­ing we all agree that a pri­mary dif­fer­ence between “art” and “design” is that design is meant to be used).

Auto­mo­biles

Let’s look at some­thing most of us use every day: the car. Since its intro­duc­tion, designs have var­ied a bit, and cer­tainly man­u­fac­tur­ers and design­ers con­tinue to come up with new con­cepts, but it’s clear that every car design out there has been directly influ­enced by what has come before, and not just from the same design­ers or man­u­fac­tur­ers. Do you think Henry Ford and his team designed the Model A with­out first look­ing at what oth­ers had done, and incor­po­rat­ing the good parts?

Lap­tops

This shouldn’t need any fur­ther expla­na­tion for this audi­ence: think of almost any worth­while fea­ture of a lap­top, and then think of how many man­u­fac­tur­ers copied that fea­ture and incor­po­rated it into their own designs. It’s exactly like the com­ment Jeff men­tioned from the Microsoft guy at SXSW last year about Vista’s win­dow switch­ing mim­ic­k­ing Exposé: how many Apple lap­top fea­tures have become stan­dard in all lap­tops over the years?

iPod

Easy exam­ple: Apple wasn’t the first com­pany to think “ooh, let’s allow peo­ple to put music on a portable device and carry it around with them!” They weren’t even the first to allow you to do that with dig­i­tal files. And do you think they were the ones who came up with the idea to let users lis­ten to their music using head­phones? Sure, they invented and pio­neered other parts of the phys­i­cal inter­face, and engi­neered an entire expe­ri­ence, but much of the core con­cept that is crit­i­cal to the device was not original.

Phones

Think about it for about 10 sec­onds, then make your own list. This one’s easy. (yes yes, Apple is doing new things with the iPhone, but seri­ously, it’s still a phone, still makes and receives calls, still has a speaker and a mic, and is hand-held–think about the cor­ner­stones of the design and you find an exist­ing idea with an Apple skin–and you’re damn right I’m buy­ing one :)

A few oth­ers for your perusal

• Pens/Pencils
• Air­planes
• Heli­copters
• Cam­eras
• Chairs

I can go on like this for hours list­ing things we use every day with­out think­ing about the design process that went into them, and how many design­ers of those prod­ucts copied the good ideas and con­ven­tions that came before.

With­out this nat­ural process of appro­pri­a­tion, prod­ucts would not improve as rapidly. I argue that the same goes for any inter­face, whether phys­i­cal or vir­tual, and forc­ing your­self to start from a blank can­vas every time you design only lim­its your abil­ity to invent and inno­vate, rather than enhanc­ing it.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007.

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