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Copying is the way design works (2020)

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Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#61

Post by zogrodea »

wiz21c wrote: post #19
karmakaze wrote: post #2

This is a great quote: > In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] h…

> I broke into his house Not fun at all. Microsoft is like Disney, they steal from others and trounce others for stealing from them. Absurd people.

I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of Microsoft trouncing others?

I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public domain).

I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem" because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although that's a different problem.

I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS, though, which is most likely a failure of my memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#62

Post by robertlagrant »

m12k wrote: post #51
karaterobot wrote: post #18

> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too. I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist inste…

Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours. So to the extent that originality means diverging from those expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing your users a disservice, by not letting them lever…

Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#63

Post by robertlagrant »

rogerclark wrote: post #49

Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior. Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.

Millennial here - I played this as a teenager on our ancient-for-the-time family PC.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#64

Post by twobitshifter »

There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make it for their customer. A tailor can change a collar or stitch to match what anyone wants.There was no demand that every worker have a unique design - everyone understood it was made to order. When it becomes possible to scale a design to worldwide sales, then the claims of uniqueness seem to us to become more important - but should they?

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#65

Post by tracerbulletx »

pembrook wrote: post #29

Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines. We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses. Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives.…

This is why not much changed for 10s of thousands of years until writing was invented, and accelerated when a valid method of iteration (science) was instituted.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#67

Post by amelius »

indiv0 wrote: post #21

Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- "Everything is a Remix" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level -- the article could be called a remix of the video. The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking patents/IP law as anti-creative. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

Yes and that Disney copied old fairy tales and made them their own.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#68

Post by vizzier »

twobitshifter wrote: post #64

There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make i…

Counterpoint to that though, guilds existed as a different form of control for many hundreds or thousands of years. Instead of controlling what people can make, just control who can make it.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#69

Post by rachofsunshine »

robertlagrant wrote: post #62
m12k wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours. So to the extent that originality means diverging from those expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing your users a disservice, by not letting them lever…

Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."

As a concrete example, the idea of a mouse was once counterintuitive to users because they'd never seen one before.

Windows included Solitaire with the OS in part to introduce ideas like "click" or "click and drag" to users that were unfamiliar with GUIs, by linking them to physical concepts users did understand ("oh, I have a physical card, I can grab it and move it around, that makes sense!").

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#70

Post by chrstphrknwtn »

twobitshifter wrote: post #64

There’s been recent discussions on TV news about ’dupe’ specific sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However, the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan, but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler would look at a shoe and know how to make i…

Tom Ford commented on the issue of counterfeit and "knock off" products in the fashion industry, he said after some research (I assume by him/his company) they found that the people buying the cheap counterfeit products weren't their customers anyway, and so they weren't losing anything.
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