Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Design patents exist at the juncture of art, law, and culture and provide an exemplary foundation to intertextualize philosophy of the imagination, psychology, semiotics, and the impact of these ideas in operation through aesthetic language. In this essay, I illustrate that U.S. design patent examination is executed through a tri-layered Foucauldian grid consisting of the primary codes of the imagination, the episteme of historicity, and the execution of the systemic legal process of the design patent system. The non-obviousness requirement of the design patent system brings these elements to a crux to allow insight into the practice of evaluating novelty and the philosophy of thought. This examination concludes that improvements must be made to the design patent system to take into account the primary codes of the imagination at work, such as linguistics, experience, and psychology. The U.S. Patent Office would improve the process of the design patent legal system by creating algorithmic searching aides and a connected dialogue between designers and examiners about what a “designer of ordinary skill” means over time.