Kirby Ferguson’s Ted Talk titled "Embrace the Remix" encourages us to properly define what creativity is. He claims that creativity does not have to be about coming up with something completely new to the world, but rather something that copies something from the past, transforms it, and combines it (possibly with something of the present). I found this interesting as this is exactly what we learned in regards to patents. As Professor Lavian informed us, it's very difficult to invent something entirely new, most patents are improvements on something existing.
He compares this to Apple’s growth when it was just a startup. If they would be able to withstand the patent lawsuits from larger companies like Xerox who probably created things like icon folders and scroll bars before them, then they wouldn't have been able to become successful then.
He ties in a concept of Loss Aversion, which he describes as people having no problem copying other people, but are not fond of it when others copy them. However, this is a problem because everyone copies everyone in this era. As an example he uses Bob Dylan's songs. He says that almost 2/3 of the melodies used in Bob Dylan’s songs were borrowed.
This Ted Talk was one of my favorite because Kirby reminds us that progress comes about through the foundation that has previously been built and we should therefore accept it rather than shame or deny it for using the foundation.
No comments:
Post a Comment