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One of the most oft repeated adages in our field is: Good designers borrow, great designers steal.

In Issue 3′s “Ditching Their Free Ride,” Jeffrey Schox points out that international property rights issues are largely a matter of us versus them; for the governments of Korea and China, the decision of whether to promote the spreading of ideas over their protection is about providing the maximum good to their own people.

Within our society, however, how shall we decide what is maximally good? The groundswell around the intellectual property rights debate has recently motivated the introduction of a new political party: The Pirate Party. What I find most interesting is that the name of the party concedes that theft or appropriation may be occuring, and asks, so what?

What is the designer’s stake in these intellectual property battles? On one hand, we have a vested interest in protecting the objects of our invention, so that we might reap the fruits of our labor before some copy cat does. On the other hand, our ability to work fast and free is hampered by the persistent possiblity of litigation. What’s more, it is usually the corporations that employ designers that stand the most to lose or gain from these protections, and often we designers find our attempts to improve the world thwarted by the need to maximize profit.
This ownership of ideas is a recurring issue in our community. From the perspective of property law, we designers are an immoral bunch, justifying the appropriation of ideas, technology and aesthetics if the theft is performed well, to good effect and with aplomb. But perhaps the design community should make an attempt to define its own sense of morality: to articulate whether, and why we value being great over being first, to strike a balance between the reaping of fruit and the tending of soil, and to reconcile difference between being philosophically right and pragmatically better.

BusinessWeek has a new magazine rolling off the presses: INside Innovation. I enjoy editor Bruce Nussbaum’s unfiltered glee over their issue 1:

I can’t believe the cover Modernista came up with. Brilliant. And I can’t believe we are actually running it. Courageous.

…if he does say so himself! In one of the (many) other posts from that day, there’s a little reflexivity to go with the enthusiasm:

We have an amazing team. I think I’ll stop now and calm down. The flow is killing me.

Michael Beirut at DesignObserver, has some decidedly unsunny things to say about the magazine, and their “innovative way of doing design.” The title is telling: “The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation?”

It’s important to keep in mind that INside Innovation (or “IN” as Bruce & Co. clearly hope it will be nicknamed) is for design management. (For me, that term always conjures up images of pointy-haired bosses with hip shoes). Trying to get design firms to do work for you for various flavors of free is wholly consistent with the goals of design management. I can’t help but wonder if we’re starting to see our version of the cultural rift that divides, say, WIRED from Red Herring.
As for me, I’ll reserve my snark for the theme of innovation. The New New Thing in 2006 is Newness itself. I’m already imagining the t-shirts! “Innovation: because Old is so 5 minutes ago.”

A wonderful interview with Alvaro Cassinelli from University of Tokyo:

From the very first moment I arrived to Tokyo (five years ago), I was surprised by the multiplicity of faces this city has to offer (I am talking here about the pure visual and architectural aspects). In particular, this city looks very different during the day and during the night; being fond of (digital) photography, I searched for a while to take a snapshot that would somehow represent the city at all times (and places) at once. Eventually, I decided to compose it out of thousands of pictures – a work of cubist flavor.

Over at the Captology Notebook, BJ Fogg relates this gem:

When former student Chika Ando was translating my book into Japanese, she wanted to verify the origin of the word captology, so I explained it to her. I coined the word in 1996 to refer to the overlap between computers and persuasion — computers as persuasive technology = capt

Chika had been reading online how people had translated this word in Japanese. My acronym escaped them. Instead, they translated captology based on a Japanese word that means “to capture little animals.”

Somehow, the Japanese version seems more accurate every year.

We saw them at the Maker Faire, and they were pretty cool… if you didn’t get enough of the Fire Truck then, you can visit The Crucible at the Fire Arts Festival this summer, July 12-15.

A interesting story from the BBC (“Grey gamers flex brain muslces”) talks about how Japan is recasting video games for the older generation, in an effort to keep their older population more mentally active.  Video game companies seem to be aiming for an increasingly wider audience, first babies, now this.  It’s a little odd to think how in the future, retired people won’t go to the golf course, but be playing PGA tour on the Playstation 7…