In the world of homogeneity, you cannot escape seeing double. Or triple. Or quadruple.

Or more.

You see different brands of shampoo in similar packaging. Different fashion brands with similar designs (remember the World Cup jackets?). Different beer brands in the same kind of bottles. Even different chocolate brands with look-alike wrappers so similar that you have to think twice about whether that is the one you’ve been calling your favorite. “I love your new Ipod video!” “It’s a Creative Zen, actually.”

Oops.

Homogeneity is fine when we use it to talk about the market economy—in a perfect competition market, “goods and services are perfect substitutes, and there is no product differentiation,” says everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia—Wikipedia.

Products are supposed to be similar in order to create a fair market of competition where consumers do not have any influence over the exorbitant prices of MP3 players but have the free will to choose which brand and model they want. To be innovative and creative is to figure out new ways to market the same product to get an edge over your competitor.

Design homogeneity, however, is a sin in and of itself. Copy my design and I’ll sue you, says the world. Just the mention of product design lawsuits brings to mind the recent Nokia lawsuit against the two China mobile services companies for manufacturing and selling mobile phones that copy the “proprietary and legally protected industrial designs” of the Nokia 7260 mobile phone model. Besides the usual headlines announcing results of the lawsuit, Nokia’s representative lawyer posted a full page notice of a few of Nokia’s handphone designs with a caption saying that Nokia is the “registered proprietor of various design registrations in Singapore including, but not limited to the following designs (pictures)”. Mercy is not a luxury you can afford in the rat race—specifying your stand (early) is the way to go.

Besides the hullabaloo of Nokia’s lawsuit, Apple and Creative went to court, again, for another lawsuit resulting from Creative’s alledged plaguarism of Apple’s iPod design. Adding on to that, with the advancement of technology comes hardware and software piracy, which are being condemned with efforts to curb piracy flaring like never before. Reproduction of fakes is a sin intolerable. Imitations can burn in hell—where they don't infringe on copyright issues.

With creative juices running dry, designers resort to using objects lying around for inspiration. Since mobile phones have become a necessity in many people’s mundane lives, the evolution of their designs has also increased at a speed faster than a speeding bullet. Every time you turn your head, there is a new model lying around waiting to engulf consumers and confuse them into buying what they believe is the newest best in the market. And because there are only so many differences (in design) a handphone can take before it crosses the line to being impractical (like the Nokia lip-stick look-alike phone), one must be unconventional in one’s creativity. So the end result is a washing machine look-alike handphone from DOPOD and the latest Toshiba phone that looks like a refrigerator. And because lawyers’ letters fly around like bumblebees these days, we shall decline to name names. Or models, if we want to be precise.

Sin or not, products seek to be practical and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. If copying is what it takes, then so be it—so long as they don’t get caught, no? Amazing how he can look like her and you and I look like them and she looks like us, all in the name of…

Cheryl Chan

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