tshirts, sustainable design, ethics, memes, bendable elements,

So I says, Mabel… Mabel I says…. (she offered to make me a shirt like the one pictured)

No on the shirt… that is super cool of you. As far as why not on the shirt.. I will give you an example:

In building the hotel, there are a lot of niche furniture builders throughout the world… global coops that are run by export and trading companies. That Bombay Company is a good example of a location centered version of that. Cost Plus might be better, but most of these things are massproduced. There are new entities like:

http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/

Which rocks. They work on a much smaller level than what we need within the hotel, but it works as far as what we are talking about here.

OKAY.. so you get it. Some 16 year old kid in Madagascar has a cool idea for a basket, makes it, and is able to distribute his/her idea worldwide. It is actually *amazing*… and a total redefinition for commerce in business. It is rare that people in destabilized countries or communist countries that can participate in stabilized (relatively) capitalistic economies.

SO… the business of knock offs is huge. Someone will hunt for very individual, very special pieces of original art.. lamps, tables, chairs, etc…. If they see a light fixture or rug or chair they likes, they calls his people back in India or China, and they manufacture large scale reproductions of that product. Who are “they”? Ahh.. the age old question.

Meaning… not only do you steal the idea from some*one* instead of a large corporation, but you also devalue their artistic merit through flooding the market with the fake versions.

That all being said.. it becomes an ethical issue, and you choose whether you want to participate in a stupid as hell ethical discourse, or you just live life and don’t worry about it.

For some damned reason, I choose ethical discourse, and decided all this the first time I thought about making that shirt “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE”. I realized it was some artist from Minnesota… so I paid like… WAY WAY too much for that shitty shirt. It is just letters… no big whoop.

But… you will be happy to know that this project is going over budget because a lighting designer, myself, and a couple others encouraged sustainable and ethical environmental design…. or at least, reinforced our ideals at meetings, and our project is completely, “knock-off” free!!!! HOOT HOOOT.

The converse, if I may play devil’s advocate to myself, is that Thomas Jefferson has this quote about the inability of finding proprietary ownership in ideas… that once something is spoken or thought aloud… or given to the public, it is officially public domain, and there is no ability to surpress it, or contain it… as it takes a life on of its own.

Then we get into socially inherited genetics. Like memes and shit… which is what that guy on Monday is going to talk about.

I think I have mentioned that before.. you know… like… a knock knock joke, or an ancient social etiquette. No one knows where they started, or when they will end… but those ideas are eternal.

We are a blip on the map compared to some of those ideas… suggesting we are simply housing, or vehicles, for the autonomous world that is ideas…. that they are what are truly alive, and we are just temporal machines to transport them.

I don’t know if that freaks you out, because it scares the heeby jeebies out of me.

Back to the shirt… I guess you can totally make one. It is all relative. Public domain, bitches.