Terry,
I don't have the time or energy to respond to everything you've said here. As an overall comment, I would point out that everyone tends to act out the old Michael Franks lyric: "What good is your song if it ain't in my key?" Yup. A lot of design folks do things you don't care about.
Nothing I do or study regarding design does much to advance a goal of automating decisions to deal with the problems raised by multiple feedback loops. I have some doubts about your quest but I wish you well in your attempts. I am, however, fine with admitting that I am doing nothing to advance your dream nor are most people practicing and/or studying design of various sorts. I'm not upset that you are doing little to advance any of my interests. To dismiss what other people do because it isn't what you wish they would do seems odd to me.
As to your claims, I'll just concentrate on the "plagiarism” thing. The word plagiarism is not a good description of what you are saying. Plagiarism is not copying. It is lying.* It is taking credit that is not due. It's a term that gets used too often as a general term of disapproval to cover many dissimilar acts with different ethical dimensions. Its use usually tends to obscure more than it clarifies.
One thing that is clear to me is that if there is a successful version of the design history you seem to imagine, previous models would become well known and copyists could not even pretend to take credit for the accomplishments studied. That makes plagiarism the wrong word to describe the copying you see as the only point. The origins would be known to many and would no more be plagiarism than my using a phrase from Shakespeare or the King James bible would be.
I quibble about this not just because I think you were wrong but because I believe that it reveals a fundamental mistake on your part. You seem to believe that originality means an escape from previous creation--that the Bauhausian "starting from zero" is possible and desirable. It is neither.
Everything we do is based on things previously done. If I managed to write this email in a manner that was original in the sense of eschewing all precedents, nobody would understand it. You used the design of a crankshaft as a task where most engineers rely on previous models. The fact that we aren't questioning what contains the crankshaft reveals that we are accepting the previous state of things as a good basis for advancement. (Q: How many designers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: What does it *always* have to be a lightbulb?)
I think your posts have raised some interesting questions but they devolve into seemingly-intentional insult rather than a real exploration of issues. I believe that you are wrong when you dismiss the study of design history as merely a pile of templates for designers' reuse but even if you were right, the questions of when that reuse is productive, when it is useful , and when it is ethical are interesting and important. You can do better than to pretend that dismissing that as "plagiarism" is accomplishing anything except a reduction of our understanding of design.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.art.ecu.edu
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
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*Yes. The word "plagiarism" comes from a Latin word for stealing slaves or children. Slaves or children; wow. Combine that with claims of "moral rights” that often revolve around "patrimony" and you have the start of an interesting feminist analysis of "intellectual property" claims. And there are more feedback loops on that than we might imagine.
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