Appreciation vs Appropriation ...
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Appropriation is not appreciation. If you appreciate someone or something, you would never try to steal the person’s identity, their religious icons, or their possessions—
particularly, for profit. You would instead show them respect by better understanding their plight (cultural, personal, expressional).
To understand this subtle distinction, spend a minute and think about your family. Each of you have rituals, stories, and personal effects that remind you of who you are, from whence you came, and what is important to you. Now imagine someone breaking into your house one day and taking those very personal items —whether heirlooms, relics, or photos—and selling them on the Internet for profit.
The person who stole them likely understands their value in-and-of-themselves, which is why they appropriated them for sale; and the buyer who acquires them likely appreciates their beauty as well. But neither the person who stole them nor the person who purchased them truly grasps the history between the individual and the object, the context within which the object came to mean something to the individual, or how that very relationship gets at the nature of sacredness. They are simply objects to be had, sold, and used in ways other than intended.
Now extend that understanding to culture in general. As far back as anyone can remember, human beings have drawn on their surroundings for inspiration and materials to create shelter, clothing, and art. By studying these sources and materials, scholars, students, and curious members of the public can learn not only what is and has been important to a given society but also how they responded to the forces at work in their world. The sources provide the context within which we understand ourselves and another.
The same is true today. The materials we use to make things, and how we choose to communicate about ourselves and the forces at play in the world, inform what we value. In "design speak," these forces are known as trends, and we see them play out in patterns, materials, and methods of production. They, too, provide a context for understanding ourselves and others.
With the dawn of the Internet, and the proliferation of sites like Pinterest and Instagram, trends emerge and take hold much faster than ever before. Bloggers and other online voices take this information one step further, curating the rapidly evolving digital world and packaging it into concepts for living, cooking, dressing, communicating, and more.
In this modern process of finding, publishing, and repackaging, oftentimes not only is the source material lost but so, too, is the context within which the object was produced. And when this disappears, so, too, does the notion of ownership or authorship. Appropriation happens when an object is separated from the people and culture that produced it. In that process, something that once possessed meaning and beauty becomes a shell of its former self, is stripped of its identity, and transformed into an entity to be consumed.
That so much appropriation is happening at such a rapid pace with very little outcry begs the questions: What is worth protecting? What is sacred? And can people (or cultures) actually own designs?
With so many industries-fashion, textiles, furnishings, entertainment- turning to global cultures for design inspiration, we believe it is time to ask these questions and to provide some guidelines for how to work with this material respectfully.
Let’s examine a few examples of “global design” at work in the marketplace.