This chapter details what a better understanding of the creative process should mean for copyright law. Instead of continuing to avoid any rigorous analysis of creativity, courts should investigate authorial motivation and solicit expertise to help diagnose the presence of the required “creative spark.” These changes would bolster copyright’s role in incentivizing the production of creative works while avoiding awards of copyright to unoriginal artworks. The chapter also explains how to recalibrate design patent law in light of what we understand about audience perception of design. The trier of fact should examine whether a design choice makes the design easier or harder for audiences to process. Design choices to be simpler, more prototypical, or more congruous are already likely sufficiently rewarded by consumer choices in the marketplace and should be presumed to lack the originality needed for design patent protection. Through a series of visual examples from actual design patent cases, the chapter explains how, by analyzing the effect of a design choice on visual processing fluency, courts can stop treating all design differences the same.

Design patents protect the way a product looks whereas utility patents protect the way a product is used. The law suggests a great disparity between the artistic creation relevant to design patents and the scientific creation relevant to utility patents. The design process is believed to be so personal and subjective that judges refuse to consider any part of a design more important than another. This stands in sharp contrast to the law’s assumptions about scientific invention, which permits objective and focused evaluation of the invention and its prior art. This art/science double standard does not jibe with evidence that the same neural phenomena are at work in all kinds of creative tasks. For scientists as well as designers, both sides of the brain must be engaged in the same process: coming up with an idea, then building on that idea so that it is useful. To earn design patent protection, a claimed design must be “nonobvious” to “the ordinary designer.” To the extent judges refuse to rigorously compare claimed designs against earlier works to determine nonobviousness, they are straying from the way designers actually generate innovative design.

Design patents are meant to promote designs that are “pleasing,” “attractive,” and “beautiful.” Yet judges fret that they will inject their own prejudices into such aesthetic determinations and have adopted a permissive nonobviousness standard that only rejects designs when they are exact copies of what came before. Neuroscience sheds light on the mechanics of design perception and appreciation. Visual processing is arguably the best understood mental process in modern neuroscience. Recent studies show that aesthetic preference is strongly tied to the ease with which an observer can mentally process a particular design. Although a limited amount of innovation may be needed to gain the observer’s attention, consumers insist on simplicity, familiarity, and congruence in designs. Rather than correlating with what an audience considers pleasing, innovation in design, after rapidly reaching an optimal level, begins to trigger aesthetic distaste. I use a variety of examples from popular products and actual cases—like Herman Miller’s Aeron chair and Lego blocks—to illustrate this audience preference for designs in the “aesthetic middle.”

Tracing the character merchandising of Beatrix Potter, Chapter 2 explores why Potter is both a creative and an industrial author. She directly engaged with the idea of childhood where the parent was a consumer, an idea that affected the direction of her creativity. Potter’s forethought in registering copyright and design rights is much commented on by her biographers. However, at that time, intellectual property law struggled with the very idea of an ‘industrial author’. Although Potter popularised an expanded idea of authorship and intellectual property, she never used her rights defensively to protect the ‘Peter Rabbit’ range of merchandise from imitation and piracy. Rather, incensed by the piracy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in the United States and frustrated by her dealings with British doll-makers, she was drawn into debates about British manufacturing, the politics of international trade and the reform of tariff law. Potter’s legacy was to encourage the practice of authorising iterations of popular character designs across an ever-increasing range of goods circulating as appropriate gifts for children and decorative embellishment for the home.

Anyone who studies design today is confronted with a professional field that places a variety of demands on future designers. Designers are expected to solve problems of all kinds in innovative ways: They should be able to implement briefings reliably and keep the production method and its costs in mind; they should be able to predict trends reliably; they should know their target groups and deliver products tailored to them. Of course, designers should also be able to communicate, visualize, and present their ideas convincingly. Rarely are these skills combined in one person, which is why designers also need to be able to work in a team. Students should therefore not only be sensitized to design, but also to intercultural differences, and be familiar with and able to classify different social milieus in order to design accordingly for specific target groups (families with small children, for example, hardly ever buy tables with sharp edges). Students should also become aware of their own esthetic preferences and staging strategies. This chapter presents an example of undergraduate research in design and discusses theoretical and conceptual problems of research in design.

As a domain of enquiry within the study of material culture, “technology” occupies a very paradoxical place. It is at the same time pervasive, infusing subfields such as design, art, infrastructure, or the digital, and yet it is conspicuously absent as a distinct topic compared to, for instance, religion, art, or consumption. This chapter explores the history of thinking surrounding the concept of “technology” and its components of technical activities, objects, and systems.

Where is the line between virtual and real? This chapter introduces readers to the complex components, physical and virtual, which constitute our rapidly changing digital world. It examines how digital forms of representation blur the boundaries between what is considered material. The chapter addresses issues of transcendence and transgression in virtual space.

Chapter 3 explains the methods of scribes for ruling manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century, from a variety of works but especially those of Thomas Hoccleve. It notes that scribes imposed geometric designs onto materials hylomorphically. It then contrasts their failures to achieve regular design. It suggests that ruling patterns seldom had a practical function to articulate the text by means of page design, but that ruling was sometimes a craft process pursued almost habitually by scribes, and at other times was an inherited convention with a force of its own. It concludes that ruling on the material pages was less important to scribes than the immaterial ideas that governed page design. Ruling was ultimately jettisoned.

This chapter explores concepts of adornment, bodily modification, imagery, language, and the built environment, and how they form venues of material expression and representation of human bodies and identities. It includes a focus on subcultures and the material expression of othering, inequality, resistance, subversion, and transgression, in other words the politics of representation.

Chapter 4 considers the division of texts into pages and leaves in manuscripts in English poetry and prose in the fifteenth century. It suggests that this material format allowed scribes to fanfare their own craft process, when they decorated the division of the codex into pages for its own sake, as a mere convention without textual function. But it then argues that page breaks contributed little to the text itself. It notes other methods used by scribes to override the page breaks and argued that they were more interested in the continuity of the text and of the reading process beyond the literal limits of the page.