Skulina Hlif Kjartansdottir

Week 17: Invention, Intellectual Property and Income

This week we will learn about various aspects of managing invention and intellectual property, as well as ways of establishing income for our designs. This is the agenda.

Week 17: Assignment

This week the assignment is develop a plan for dissemination of our final project.

I am for an open access to information and working with ideas and processes in collaboration with other professionals and companies with relevant expertise. I have worked in such environments, like in the computer games industry, where developing is carried out in teams and I am aware of the advantages of working out new ideas with others and managing creative processes to maximise results.

I look at my final project idea as an attempt to create a work of art and design that can have different developmental aspects. During this first experimental phase I can perceive the basic idea or concept - "Flower2Sound" or "Flower4Sound" (also "Flower2Music" or "Flower4Music") - to be expanded upon and be presented as a copyrighted artwork at an exhibition or online as a representation of the artwork.

The field of innovation and intellectual property is a world of its own, some would say a jungle. I did check up on some of the resources recommended, such as the report "Science The Endless Frontier", published in 1945 and the various forms of licencing. When researching licencing the Creative Commons principles appealed the strongest to me. CC have a web tool that allows you to structure your licence according to your preferences, as well as to learn about the various aspects of licencing. When I entered my preferences it resulted in the selected licence "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International".


flowers2sound by Skúlína Hlíf Kjartansdóttir is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. Check here to view the the Licence Deed and the Licence Code for this licence. I did a quick Google Patent Search to see if this concept with before-mentioned names were being circulated, but it did not come up with any positive results from these exact names. But it turned up a suggestion for the name "flowers 4sound" with one chinese patent: "Flower type sound mixing music box" which at a quick glance was not quite comparible to my project idea, based on functionality.

I like to think that there is a potential for my project to be developed as a designed multiple that could be made in sets that work in tandem and perhaps customised to fit certain situations or locations. I would welcome the opportunity to work on such projects with others that could contribute to developing my concept, such as programmers, sound experts, musicians or composers.

Regarding the aspect of generating an income from this project there can be possible avenues to explore. I can see that happening in relation to architectural design where different habitats or public spaces are created, where discerning customers want to install one-off creations that could vary in size, shape and functionality. I could also imagine the opportunity to develop a more commercial version of the concept that could go into production, for retail distribution via design stores or home interior shops. These potentials remains to be explored and I welcome all contacts and correspondance in that direction.