|
|
|||||
Ignite Show: Jeff Veen on Great DesignersGood designers copy. Great designers steal. In this week's Ignite Show Jeff Veen, well-known for his design work on Google Analytics, Wikirank and Typekit, lays out a strong argument for why iPhone imitators are the cargo cults of the digital era. The people building touchscreen knock-offs don't understand what makes the iPhone great. So instead of creating an end-to-end service they attempt to imitate it's flashiest features - kind of like Pacific Islanders who built "planes" out of bamboo. Wikipedia provides further context for the use of the term cargo cults in this way. From time to time, the term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance. The error of logic made by the islanders consisted of mistaking a necessary condition (i.e., building airstrips, control towers, etc.) for cargo to come flying in, for a sufficient condition for cargo to come flying in, thereby reversing the causation. On a lower level, they repeated the same error by e.g. mistaking the necessary condition (i.e. build something that looks like a control tower) for building a control tower, for a sufficient condition for building a control tower. This episode of the Ignite Show was filmed at Ignite SF. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You can see more episodes of the Ignite Show on our site or subscribe in iTunes.
|
|||||
© 2012, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (707) 827-7019(800) 889-8969 All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. |
|||||
Comments: 3
Alex Tolley [26 August 2009 08:08 PM]
I want my 5 minutes back. If this is another example of the best of Ignite, then I call the emperor as having no clothes.
eric [27 August 2009 08:29 PM]
oh lighten up Alex. The emperor may have no clothese, but there's indigenous nudity at 1:55
May [ 2 September 2009 12:11 PM]
I have NEVER heard a worse misinterpretation of that quote. Good artists copy. Monkey see monkey do - and through trial and error we get there in the end. We copy from references and from peoples emotions and all of the like. GREAT artists steal. That's why they're great. Because face it; if you're going to claim something as your own, you wouldn't claim something crap as your own.
To copy; one must put the effort in to recreate something. To steal, that effort isn't there. So he was talking from his bollocks, in my opinion.