Copying vs. Inspiration

Folks, I received this comment on the blog the other day. Let's read it together.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Credenza Plan":

Tyler and Lisa are building cheap knock off furniture. You must really be novice, and young not to realize the error you are making in publicly posting your intent to deliberately copy work. This is a terrible start to your career.

Wahoo! Criticism! Yes! Let’s learn and grow together! So, there's a lot of stuff going on here. There's an overall sentiment that we are doing wrong, and there's some mockery, and some insults. Let's talk about this.

My guess is that this person stumbled upon our blog and came to some quick conclusions without really grasping the content. Since this comment does seem to make some assumptions about us that don't seem totally applicable, please let me clear up a few things. This house project has nothing to do with our careers. They are separate. This is a blog about building our personal home. The blog was started for our friends and family who were curious on the progress of the house. We do not have any sponsors and do not get any financial support for building the house or writing a blog. The blog is not a tutorial or business venture. We are not selling anything. I often like to point out that we don't educate you or teach you anything on the blog. It's just progress information.

So, back to the comment. Unfortunately, this comment was left anonymously, which is a shame, because I would have preferred dialogue. But, luckily this is my blog, so I can start the dialogue. So, the comment expressed frustration at us for discussing our design inspirations for furniture, making our own version, and then putting this information on the blog. By doing this, it was never our intent to hurt anyone or to come across as sneaky. We are not making furniture to sell; we are making furniture for our personal use in our home. We are not providing any sort of tutorials on how to make someone else's furniture. We are, however, being very transparent about what is inspiring us.

This comment echoes a larger issue out there that I thought would be interesting to address: using other people’s ideas. Now some of you will yell, “thief!” and others will say, “yeah, so?”. It is, no doubt, confusing territory. Of course, I’m not talking about actually duplicating someone else’s work for profit, which is not cool. I’m getting at the messy grey area, where you like someone’s idea and you use it in your own work.

At its most basic form, this debate is about the ownership of ideas. The essential difference between copying an idea and being inspired by an idea comes down to how you make it your own. There has to be some sort of new content added to the old. Wouldn’t you agree? Kirby Ferguson discusses this in his Ted Talk, “Embrace the Remix”. (Watch the 10-minute video here.) He explains the inspirational process as: copy, transform, and combine. Kirby argues that everything is an adaptation of something else, and that adaptation is just part of the design process. So true! We all build inspiration from the world around us and outside ourselves.We are all adding content to former ideas. The things that we are inspired by were once inspired by something else. In that sense, design is such an evolutionary process. So, I’d say that using other people’s ideas is unavoidable, if not inevitable.      

  

So, that’s where I am at. What do you think of all this? Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments! Anonymous, mean-spirited, or insulting comments will not be posted. :)

(Thanks to the handful of design professionals whose brain I picked on this topic and who gave me some cool sources to check out.)