glide | designboom.com (this guy says his toaster is totally different from every single one that already exists! Does it?! And wasn’t this a ceramis contest?! )
Well, I see your point and frankly I thought a little bit of the same when I quickly browsed through the results a few days ago. You seem to have a good eye for what is around, some (most) of the originals you point to were new to me and I thought I knew a lot. Some of the originals were not originals either, like the ghost shaker for example. I think it was Authentics some maybe ten years ago? Or the knitted cup/pot holder. Brother haven’t we seen variations of those!
But ceramics is a very difficult material to work with and most things have most likely been made somewhere already. Also students seem to have to go through the same ideas at some stage. Just something I have noticed. The industry is also in general quite boring, and is at least in Europe up a certain creek without a specific instrument. The quality of the far east factories is stunning, and so is the price, thus the suffering. Very little actually happens on an intellectually interesting level outside the small individual studios. Unfortunately they have difficulties surviving even if the products are good. Some do of course, but it is very tough and labor intensive career to choose.
Hmm, quite interesting. However, I don’t think that all the listed examples are sufficient proof that they plain copied other designs. This being said, I’m also of the oppinion that quite a lot of the designs in the competition were boring and seen before. They might have changed the shape of the mug a little bit, but there weren’t many ideas as to utilize ceramics in new ways…
Even if the students blatently copied the products you point out (which I highly doubt they did), there is sufficient precedent in industry to indicate that “borrowing” is a regular practice in the “real world” (cough Zune cough).
With post-modernism effectively promoting free usage of other peoples ideas, of course we’re going to see it more an more.
The thing is… i’ve seen a lot of non-awarded projects that were pretty good, and FAR from being copies!!
You are saying that there are no new ideas, and I can tell you that’s not true! There are EXCELLENT designers with EXCELLENT designs around. Different stuff. New stuff. And we need to open a door to those designers, and don’t support the ones that have lack of imagination.
You’ll see it more and more the older you get, not just in product, but in apparel, graphics, music… things come back around and get remixed and re-synthesized unconsciously. Old, outdated ideas come into vogue again and then go back out of popular thinking. It happens.
All this decorative repeat stuff going on now is just a rehash of Art Nouveau and Charles Renee Mackintosh type work. The clean minimalist of a few years ago was just Bauhaus.
I just feel like this thread may be more about someone who did not win the competition rather than the people that did win?
I’ve lost more competitions than I care to remember. You can’t predict how the jurors will go. They might have something specific in mind, they might be tired of seeing the same stuff everyday so they pick a tea pot made of the letters P-O-T. They may have an off day, they may not be good designers, they may be great designers and not good jurors, the company sponsoring the competition might have an agenda it asked them to follow. The key thing is that it is great to have so many competitions these days to sharpen your skills (win or loose) and if you really do come up with a great idea, you can probably find another competition it fits for. Even that Scott Wilson entry for corian (which he won) was from an old competition.
The important thing is you gotta be in it to win it.
If that site would be a bit easier to navigate, one could actually be bothered to look through all of the entries.
Some works are not very good and some are very bad, that is very true, but I wouldn’t loose my marbles over it. Most other competitions in the field don’t come up with that much new stuff either. If you really innovate something during the process, you might be better off not entering it to any competition on the internet.
Aside from the fact that I think Yo just called me old…
Zender, I as much as the next person likes to believe that I come up with truly new and unique ideas every day. But there are millions (billions) of other people on this planet coming up with the same brilliant ideas every day.
Yo was far more eloquent about than I am sure I will ever be, but “no new ideas” is based on the premise that we are all influenced by our surroundings. We are inspired by the shape of a drop of milk or the noise that was made from that bird that just shat on your window.
Not trying to call you out or anything, but I would be very interested to see if you could post a unique idea that someone on this forum couldn’t come up with some form of prior art that was the inspiration for that design, or could conceivably make the idea to be deemed a copy. Ideas feed other ideas and that isn’t a bad thing.
So, so true. When talking to students or prospects about this fact, I reference this instance. A previous firm I worked at did a lot of inventor related projects. One man came in with a fairly ingeneous methode of rethinking and tackling a complex problem for the healthcare industry. Within 3 weeks of that meeting we had 4 other inventors from a 2 state (300 mile) radious contact us with “infringable” ideas. One actually had the exact methodeology just proposed more modern materials.
From reviewing most of the links, sure some are close possibly inspired by the current products, but they are simple solutions for the most part, and could have easily been derived with no knowlege of the existing products.
As for the remark that many wont work…that is why it is a design competition for students, it is the time for you to push the boundaries and provide some highly blue-sky thinking. If one of the requirments was design a product to be manufactured using this material, this exact process, and must be manufacturable yesterday…then it might be different.
At least he didn’t use red, but he does make sure to include every feature we had in our concept. We had kids in school who got expelled for less…
It’s somewhat flattering, but it’s also kind of baffling. If you’re going to copy something for a school project, does it really make sense to then submit it to an international competition, when the concept you’re copying already won some international competitions? Haha.
Regardless, in this instance, though it was considered as an entry- it didn’t make the shortlist. Probably due to the 300+ judges that it had to go through to make it to the second round. I am surprised some of the stuff in the above competition ended up as winners though.
I’d be a little pissed. I entered the DesignBoom Beck’s bar competition with some friends a while back and was completely baffled by the short list. The winners had pretty nice stuff I will admit.
Haha yeah I was a little upset, more curious and shocked though. I got a good laugh out of it. We let the proper people know- just in case it affected any of our patents, as well as to save the people running the competition some grace if it were to make it onto the shortlist… but I’m not really sure what happened beyond that. There’s always that one in a thousand chance that it’s a total coincidence, right?
But seriously, I did notice some ‘same as’ designs in this competition. What I can’t understand is why copy something if it offers little user (or heck aesthetic) benefits anyway? I see design as largely evolutionary, i.e. absorbing what’s good, discarding what’s bad, doesn’t work, looks wrong, helps no one etc… And jurors do seem crazy sometimes.
Wow that bicycle thing was really something. Must be a extremely embarrassing to be that guy. But in the real world that’s just how it is. I remember some five years ago talking to one boss at Koziol at a trade fair. He told me they had their new product stolen from the display and found it in a different hall in another booth where a guy was taking orders for it. He had not even bothered to scratch off the Koziol logo.
IKEA is notorious for it. I have somewhere saved their ad were they had a picture of a Rosenthal Thomas -plate and next to it a very similar IKEA -plate. They had the retail price of both plates clearly visible in big letters and the text said something like “why pay too much for the same good design?”.
i have never seen anything like that. That is unbelievable. It fires me up and I was not even involved. What is really bad is that they sort of ruined the original which, BTW, EVERY designer has to have seen.
When Yo and I worked on the Clipwatch for Timex we were copied about fifty differerent times. Sometimes by the factory that manufactured the original. Even that was not as bad as the example you showed. I would be fired up.
