Building on the Work of Others as an Integral Part of Originality Essay - 4

Building on the Work of Others as an Integral Part of Originality - Essay Example According to the research findings, the definition of original could be something like â€Å"builds off of previous works in the field to make something new in some important way.† The reason creating a definition of original has to focus on using other people’s ideas is that using someone else’s ideas *has* to be part of creating anything new. Otherwise, creation will just be a constant process of reinventing the wheel. This is a problem in several important ways. Firstly, creating something new, that is not based on someone else’s ideas, takes a lot more time and effort – imagine what the world would be like if every single person who wanted to use the computer had to invent their own language for programming it, their own operating systems and so on. So the process of progress, of creating new thing has to use other people’s ideas to save time and energy, and actually, have time to do something new or original with it. Without this time sa ving it would be nearly impossible to actually spend any time on a true invention. Not only does creating something from scratch take a great deal more time than using other people’s ideas and building off of them, but it also actually helps promote original things (that is, things that look different or operate differently from what came before them). If someone was trying to design a car, for instance, without ever having looked at a car before, they would probably create something that looked a great deal like early automobiles, because those were simple and natural designs. But if someone were to look at cutting-edge designs like a 2012 Porsche or Cadillac, use those as a starting point, and then move forward by adding or subtracting features, streamlining here or making more elegant there, then the work would look different than what came before.