After the dramatic events of day 3 which I fortunately missed out on, Furniture Works had managed to regroup and relocate for day 4 which was on intellectual property. This module was headed by Marice Cumber from the intellectual property advice company Own-it. She had scheduled a range of speakers from various sectors of the IP industry.

The first speaker was David Morgan from the UKIPO. He gave an overview of how IP works and some case-studies showing the value of IP to a company. I had seen him speak before at a previous London Remade seminar and it was a good refresher on the basics of IP.

The second speaker was Luke Pearson from PearsonLloyd Design. It was great to hear first hand experience of the ups and downs of licensing a product. His experience of licensing is, it takes away from the hassle of manufacturing and you get a nice cheque each year. Saying that: on the downside it isn’t as lucrative as you would imagine and you have to be prolific with your designing to keep the checks rolling in.

Following on From Luke Pearson was Margret Briffa for BRIFFA. She led us through the legal side of the licensing process. Margret gave us the key points to watch for when setting up a contract. It was all very interesting but quite fast paced. To make matters worse we had another fire alarm during her presentation. Thankfully it was only a test and no more damage had been done to the building. Margret did supply us with a hand out defining the different areas of IP each with their pros and cons which I’m sure will be very handy in future.

The last speaker was Philip Johnson from 7 New Square Barristers, he took us through the 5 types of design registrations. An interesting but somewhat deceptive area of IP, mainly due to the very similar names for each variation of registration. For me to explain what I learned would be complex indeed, but I do now know a lot more about the design registration than i used to.

In summary of my latest experience of IP; It is a very valuable area of the product design process for designers to get their head around. Finding out early-on in the design process that someone else has the rights to what you thought was your great idea will save you a lot of time and money. It may even lead to you coming up with something better, as is often the way with design.