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The Death of Originality in Design- Coming to Terms

Originality in the creative world is dead. If originality were a person, its obituary would have been extensively written and re-written several decades ago together with a whole series of memoirs, well before the advent of the Internet. Its demise however has not been readily acknowledged by the design community and till date, several designers are still claiming to have found “originality” in their creative endeavours. Truth be told, I am often left quietly bemused when I chance upon design portfolios emblazoned with opportunistic slogans such as these: “We make wholly original and creative websites”. Are they staging a dramatic (and historic) resurrection of an age-old concept? I think not.

  In the current postmodern era of information technology and social networking (the cast of Twitter and company please stand up), it is near impossible to stake a claim on any idea as being “original” because we live in an intelligent world of derivations – everything is a “copy” of a “copy” and some copies are more uniquely construed while others emerge as blatant “rip-offs”. I am not being cynical but the death of originality is an understood fact which we often deliberately ignore either for commercial (would you employ the services of a design studio that proclaims the death of originality?) or personal reasons. If originality has dissolved then what has taken its place? I have a proposed answer: “deception”. Read on.

Creativity and Originality are Bitter Foes Not Friends

  Creativity and originality do not bear any semblance of interconnectivity. In fact they are polar opposites. Originality in its traditional contextual usage refers to the unique invention of an idea or project, one that has not been explored previously. Creativity however acknowledges the death of originality, and it concerns itself largely with, as what George Kneller once said, “re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know”. Hence, to think creatively, we must trudge through what has been done rather than engage in an aimless quest to conquer unchartered territories/avenues. If you embrace creativity (which I’m sure all designers do), then you are effectively admitting (even if you deny it) that originality has lost its proper placement in contemporary design. An idea needs to be analysed holistically before it is applied to any sort of design framework.

Subscribing to the belief that originality exists; effectively rules you out of the creative equation. Personally, I see it as a paradox and not a logical juxtaposition when someone is described as creative and original. Creativity is about building upon existing ideas, and that in definition is hardly original. Having said that, most linguistic theorists, upon hearing this, would instantaneously hurl brickbats at my direction, because as far as the dynamics of the English language is concerned, creativity is synonymous originality, and vice versa. I strongly disagree with this proposition from a design oriented perspective. Creativity and originality are on two different ends of the spectrum. 

We Are All Slaves of the Ordinary

As designers/creative individuals, we may wish to assert the integrity of imaginative vision in our projects and dislodge our association with ideas of the commonplace, but these are merely baseless desires will never be fulfilled. We are slaves of the ordinary. It is the perceivably ordinary (mainstream) concepts which provide us with the necessary structural foundations to build creatively and imaginatively. I like to think of ordinariness as the “democratic ticket” into the world of creativity. After all, from a philosophical viewpoint, we are born as ordinary beings, physically, spiritually and mentally (although supernaturalists would deem otherwise, but there is no space for that argument here). In the field of design, a thorough grasp of the ordinary will provide you with the ammunition required to re-assemble what is already known into a visual work of art that at least “seems” different. This brings me to my next point; the idea of deception.

The Master-plan of Deception – Illusion is the way forward

In many ways, design, apart from being the science of aesthetics, is also the science of illusion. Design invites us to suspend our beliefs and “play along” with a prepared script (often “written” by the designer). We want to be deceived in a way that reminds us little of actually being deceived. Let me explain. It has often been said that good design merges form and function harmoniously. In design theory, we are taught that all designs should be sensible and practical. The more pressing question is: are these traits simply “achieved” through aesthetic science alone or are they implanted (I’m tempted to use the word “fabricate” but this would then sound like a conspiracy theory!) and specifically manufactured within the minds of users? 

Design is about persuasive convincing as much as it is a methodical science. Good design is also psychologically manipulative; it has the ability to dictate the terms and conditions upon which you “read” and use a design. It is then no wonder that certain designs are referred to as “original” precisely because the design in question has successfully ingrained a very specific “viewing-mentality” amongst users, on how exactly to perceive and interpret its form and function. The concept of originality, under the above pretext, is then artificially resurrected.

There is an element of deception even in the most basic, microcosmic forms of web-development technology. The latest iteration of Cascading Style-sheets, CSS 3 for example, has been adorned with several updated features and functions. Amongst them is the new RGBA CSS declaration which allows you to set the opacity of colours thus allowing web developers to take advantage of embedding text on semi-opaque backgrounds without having the text inherit any of the opacity. The technicalities of this are irrelevant for the purposes of this article, but the philosophical principal behind the concept is interesting. In many ways, this is an example of deception and illusion. The main functionality of the feature revolves around the use of traditional design elements of transparency, opacity and RGB colours packaged within a new design framework environment – CSS 3.

Design is about re-hashing the old in new ways which seem original in both form and function. Please do also note that the terms illusion and deception are not used in a derogatory sense here but matter-of-factly.

 

Never Underestimate the Power of Influence in Design

Influence plays a major role in design especially in the networked online environment. A few weeks ago, I shared a couple of links to two articles, on Reddit. The first article generated a few negative comments, not on its content, but on the design of this site while the second article attracted positive comments on the site design. One member’s comments (we shall call him MR X) however made me think about the power influence has on design. 

Firstly, we can either assume that Mr X is terribly confused or alternatively, we can look deeper into this and realise how the power of influence can alter our perception of specific designs. It is clear that when a design starts to receive positive feedback, then the follow-up responses will always follow suit; what I call, the “herd-mentality”. Mr X however was unaware of his earlier comments and thus became a wonderful example for this point.

Similarly, when a design is (rather erroneously) termed as “original” by a majority crowd, it would then be “original” in terms of its representation. One of the reasons why originality still exist in certain quarters of the design fraternity, is due to the fact that it is a term that is constantly being used to describe design and such it has a very strong power of influence in design. 

Concluding Remarks

Is originality really dead or has its meaning evolved? I am inclined to disagree with the latter view because the whole meaning of originality connotes a sense of uniqueness that is unexplored. To me the issue at stake is not weather originality is dead, but when we would finally accept its complete dissolution. With that I leave you with a quote by 19th century French sculptor, Agueste Rodin, “I invent nothing, I rediscover.”

What are your thoughts?

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