Rewind Wednesday: Whose Design is it Anyway?

 

Today’s Rewind Wednesday post goes waaaaayyyyy back in our archives. It’s one of the very first posts I wrote. I hope it gets more than five comments this time around!! I’d love to hear your thoughts about…

Can one person “own” a design?

I was just browsing the Rate My Space web site. I saw four rooms with colour-blocked walls. They were all similar – blocks of various colours with white “grid” lines in between. A few years ago, a member of the House & Home forums painted a similar colour block & grid wall in her daughter’s bedroom. Who came up with the idea first? Did they all copy each other? Can one of them lay claim to the design?

When you think about it, every design is based on another design. We take a design that we see and like, and then create our own interpretation of it, putting our own spin on it and giving it our own personal touches. For example – these are the walls in my home office {Pics of the final design are coming soon!!}

 

It was inspired by this nursery on Rate My Space. Unfortunately, I can’t find the original post on RMS, so I can’t give proper credit to the creator of this room. {I just found the nursery featured at Project Nursery. If you’d like to learn more about it, click here.}

The inspiration for the letters on the nursery wall came from this bedding from DwellStudio:

And this bedding was inspired by… well, I guess the alphabet. The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt over 4,700 years ago. So does that mean the ancient Egyptians get credit for these three alphabet-inspired designs?

Here's another example. This is our bed:

My husband and I came up for the plans for it and built it. We based it on an upholstered bed from Restoration Hardware…

And a bed that Sarah Richardson designed for a bedroom on Sarah’s House:

There are obvious similarities between the three beds, but differences as well. All three have a nailhead trim detail. The headboard corner cut-outs and legs on our bed are based on Sarah’s bed. But Sarah used a bold patterned fabric on her bed and we used a solid brown velvet.

So who owns this design? I say all of us — and none us. The beds I used as inspiration for our bed were likely inspired by other beds. In fact, Sarah had to change her original headboard design because the original wouldn’t fit up the stairs to the bedroom. Which is an example of how a design evolves as you move through a project.

Nobody can say that a design is 100% (or even 99%) theirs. Every design is a collaboration of people and ideas — from pictures in books and magazines, TV shows, Internet forums, a friend’s house, stores, hotels, nature… design inspiration is all around us and in all of us.

Well, that’s what I think :-) What do you think??

 

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