This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Zaha Hadid is an architectural rock star. Her style has found full expression in London, Berlin, Singapore and 11 sites in China. So when she discovered that her Beijing development, Wangjing Soho, was being copied in another Chinese city before it was finished, Hadid redoubled her team's efforts to complete the project before the clone could see the light of day.
Zhang Xin, the billionaire property developer behind the Beijing project, reacted strongly to stop the copycat building. Hadid's response was strikingly different: if the copy were to solve certain architectural problems that Hadid had wrestled with, then "that could be quite exciting."
Here we have two attitudes towards copying: one that sees it as an infringement of IP; another that sees it as potentially adding to the value of a project, by bringing something new.
These ways of thinking reflect two types of copying: copying tightly is machine-like replication; copying loosely creates error. Each has its place. Tight copying is essential when you need to maintain the integrity of what is being duplicated. Emergency-planning professionals get this. They spend ages teaching the human networks they have to rely on in an end-of-the-world scenario, to avoid variation in the information they pass along.
By contrast, loose copying embraces variation and error. The difference between the beaks of Darwin's finches were taken to be the result of error and variation passed down, amplified over several generations. In the creative world, loose copying is the essential mechanism for creating new work.
As Grayson Perry puts it, "Originality is for those with very short memories." Why waste your time having a great idea that no one's had before, when there's all this material lying around ready to use? Shakespeare was a story thief - all but one of his plays have plots stolen from other writers. T. S. Eliot famously observed that it's not whether you copy but how you do it -- that is the mark of a great poet. "Blurred Lines", the Robin Thicke/Pharrell Williams composition, does of course resemble Marvin Gaye's typical late-period groove. It was meant to. Film buffs would call this "homage" (though Quentin Tarantino delights in talking about theft).
The easiest way to create something new is to copy (loosely) and create error as you do so. One way of doing this is to copy from one context to another. When Ian Schrager ported what he knew from running the mega 70s nightclub Studio 54 into the hotel business, he created the boutique hotel. Another is to copy what works and fix what doesn't: while I was always told that James Watt "invented" the steam engine, it turns out he didn't. Watt copied the design from Newcomen that had been in widespread use in the mines of Britain for more than 50 years... and added an external condenser to improve the energy efficiency.
When professor Martin Elliott of Great Ormond Street Hospital looked to Ferrari's F1 team to help improve the survival rates of his tiny patients, he did both of these things and one more: he asked a different kind of question. Rather than seek to copy from medical practice, he realised that the underlying problem he was trying to solve was a handover one (both F1 driver and child patient are attached to a number of wires and tubes, each with a pump or monitor and a specialist expert to deliver them.) By understanding "What kind of thing?" he was trying to solve, he was able to scan the universe for things to copy (loosely).
Anthropologists have long drawn a useful distinction here between invention (the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon original idea that we all shoot for) and innovation (the result of repeated loosely copying). We - romantically creative fools that we are - use the latter when we mean the former. We imagine that somehow creativity and invention is not about copying, but about the muse or our own god-like genius. Flattering I know, but maybe all that is needed is some old-fashioned (loose) copying? If it's good enough for Shakespeare, Eliot, Hadid, Eliot and the rest, isn't it good enough for you?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
