Core77

Parallel Thinking in Product Design Will Only Increase

By Rain Noe - November 7, 2012

in Design Business | Strategy & Research

Would you rather be an industrial designer or a comedian?

Silly question, I know, but here's what I'm getting at: Comedian Louis C.K. performed several bits on a 2003 comedy album, and strikingly similar bits showed up in Dane Cook's act around 2005. Fans cried foul, controversy was born. Louis subsequently squashed their "feud" (which was really fed more by the media than the comics themselves) by having Cook appear on his FX show. When comedians develop similar bits and are charitable with each other, they explain it away by citing "parallel thinking."

Parallel thinking exists in the design world too, of course, and the more minimalist an industrial design becomes, the higher the chances you'll see similar work elsewhere. Culpability becomes a tricky issue, particularly when designers hew closely to the Form Follows Function rule. When you have an uncomplicated design that's boiled down to its pure essentials, you approach a kind of universal perfection, and that universality is the tricky part in a world filled with designers.

Case in point, the cable-holding button above that we posted on earlier. It works as a shirt button and it works to hold a cable. There's nothing else, no clutter. Shapeways user Egant designed it and began selling them for under $5 each when we first heard about them. By the time our post went live, the buttons were no longer for sale.

Why? Turns out prolific entrepreneur Rob Honeycutt, a former bike messenger turned designer, had earlier patented the button design you see here:

Honeycutt contacted Egant, and while we're not privy to the discussion, the end result is Egant pulled the buttons.

This post is not about leveling accusations of piracy, as we see something larger happening here. If we charitably assume Egant had not seen Honeycutt's designs, we're looking at parallel thinking. And I believe that as 3D printers enable more of us to design simple, small objects, we'll see a lot more of this in future, as talented designers start converging on minimalist-driven perfection.

So the question is, what do we do about it? It's not practical to pore through millions of patent filings to see what has and hasn't been done. An author can type a search phrase into Google to see if his/her work has been plagiarized, but industrial designers have no such recourse. Someone could attempt to organize an easily searchable database with built-in growth capacity, but it seems a massive and expensive undertaking without any promise of profitability.

Earlier this year Louis C.K. had another well-known figure on his show, Tonight Show host Jay Leno. Years ago, when Leno was a working comedian, a reporter asked him how he dealt with other comics borrowing his jokes. "You just have to write 'em," he said, "faster than they can steal 'em." If only that were possible in our field.

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Rob Honeycutt

12 years ago

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Andrew... I think there is absolutely nothing for someone to lose if they are doing a 3D print for themselves. Even someone doing limited runs has little to lose. The upfront cost of raising an infringement case is substantial. The most you can win in an infringement case (as I understand it) is lost revenue and triple damages. That's not much if someone only sells a couple thousand dollars worth of parts.

The reverse of this happens when a large corporation chooses to infringe on a small patent holder. Then that corporation can bury the patent holder in legal costs that bleed him dry before the infringement case can ever be won.

Regarding the value of a patent, there is another way that a patent can hold value. That would be as defensive position against someone developing the parts if you are a company that has products whose business would be damaged by the sale of that product.
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Andrew

12 years ago

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Maybe people are not so concerned about searching through patents when there is little capital involved in them actually producing the item - pretty much what this button is. A simple form, small, idea for a 3D printer. There is not much too loose, just stop production. Of course, there is more to loose if the patent holder were to take further action and may feel inclined to do so if the infringer had tooled up in a tradtional way (banging out millions of the suckers...)

As far as I can tell, a patent only holds value if the concept it describes is either on the market or is licensed.
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Rob Honeycutt

12 years ago

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If I might chime in here. I'm certain that Egant had not seen my patent prior to producing his/her button. I was able to contact them and present a link to my patent, at which point they pulled the product. I've run into other cases, not with this button but another embodiment of the patent, that were in conflict and those people did not pull their product.

The patent process is very slow and laborious but I disagree with the statement from the commenter above that it's broken. There are certainly challenges you face in choosing to patent a concept. I would contend that it is an incredibly valuable thing to patent important and unique ideas. If you look outside of just the design community you begin to see the strategic advantages to patents. The patent system is an extremely important element of a robust economy.

If my patent were only about adding a cord routing feature to a button, then I would say that is probably not worth patenting. If you read through my patent what I've done is applied the concept to an extremely wide number of potential embodiments. Eventually being able to license the concept across a broad category of manufacturers is what I believe makes the concept valuable and worth patenting.

I take exception in the article to the idea that it's not practical to pore through millions of patents. On the contrary, if you are looking to develop a product yourself it is incumbent upon you to do so. The design work you do for a larger company is certainly run past their legal department and screened for patent conflicts. If you are doing design work for yourself, for products you intend to market and sell, you are exposing yourself to potential patent infringement suits if you skip such a process.

I believe it would be highly valuable for Core77 to explore ways to help designers learn more about the patent process. Get patent lawyers to write some guest articles. With Google Patent and a few basic skills poring through millions of patents is not a Herculean task. It should become a routine activity for people working in the design field.

We are certainly moving into a new age of cheap 3D printers and Kickstarter where successful entrepreneurialism is more accessible to more people. My suggestion would be to not throw the patent baby out with the bathwater. Instead learn how to use the patent system to your advantage.

Sometimes the simplest ideas create the most valuable patents. Just make sure you are the one that finds it first.
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Patrick Andrews (@PatrickRAndrews)

12 years ago

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"It's not practical to pore through millions of patent filings to see what has and hasn't been done. " and yet that is precisely what we are supposed to do. Performing a few cursory searches is often useless...despite the fact that patents are intended to promote access to ideas (free access after 20 years), in fact they are *designed* to make it hard to find prior art.
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Terri

12 years ago

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Keno, the point to getting patents and then never using them is so you can sue the pants of people when they finally do. People do that all the time. Which goes to show just how broken the system is.
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Keno

12 years ago

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Among all the reasons that the patent system is broken, this is one of my favorites..

What's the use of a patent if it never is produced ? While the original idea might have come from Honeycutt,I could have bought one yesterday from Egant.
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Ken J

12 years ago

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So where's Honeycutt's button? If I were the patent holder, I would allow them to continue to manufacture & sell by reaching an agreement rather than force them off the market. It's some asinine sense of entitlement that killed such a nifty product from reaching customers and making money for both parties. Now no one is making money.

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Dan Lewis

12 years ago

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The Patent system is broken. However it is incumbent upon designers and manufacturers to do at least minimal research. At Goggle.com/patents, it took less that 30 seconds to find Honeycutt's patent by searching "button cord holder". Even creative people have the responsibility of minimal due diligence --BTW, Egant's design is better.
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Duann

12 years ago

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We have seen this before on Shapeways with simultaneous innovation once the tools of manufacture are in the hands of those seeking to solve a problem.

http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/920-Simultaneous-Innovation-and-3D-Printing-Updated.html
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Ray Jepson

12 years ago

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You should read, "The Case Against Patents" by the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

Basically, there are somethings that are economically and socially beneficial to be patented. Most things are no longer worth it because of the pace of product development and ability to skirt around patents.

I think this button is probably not worth it. I'm sure that Egant never saw or heard of this patent. In a world of 6 billion + people, any idea that requires as little research as this is going to be created and recreated by thousands of people. A few of them with access to CAD and a 3D printer.

I say, eliminate patents. Just like Leno, we can innovate faster than people can steal and without the protection of milking patented ideas for 15-20 years, it will force us to innovate even faster.

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.stlouisfed.org%2Fwp%2F2012%2F2012-035.pdf&ei=7HiaUMjXHcSoyAHUxYGoCw&usg=AFQjCNGcbHFUhPWvW1jj4S60d1hlWYJk1A
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