The pitfalls of originality.
Design Observer has an article up by Michael Bierut about the idea of plagiarism and originality as it pertains to design. He references the recent plagiarism scandal with teen author Kaavya Viswanathan (for those as initially uinformed as I, it appears Ms. Viswanathan lifted several passages from author Megan McCafferty's two novels and made small changes to the lifted text "so as to make it less googleable"--quote from Werner Sollors). Bierut begins with Ms. Viswanathan and then makes the impressive claim that he himself is a plagiarist, as one of his most recent design projects is similar in content to another project produced earlier but that he was still aware of.
The tone of the conversation in Observer's comments falls along one major ley line: the "There is no such thing as originality" school, and the "Your use of 'plagiarism' is based on a fundamental misunderstanding" school. What is there to say about Mr. Bierut, and is there anything to learn about the nature of the human experience as a larger entity?
The answer to those questions is long and probably pedantic, but as you've already clicked on the jump, I'm comfortable submitting you to both length and pedantry. First, to say something about Mr. Bierut's article in question: Its major premise is flawed.
What he submits as plagiarism is not, in fact, plagiarized. Yes, it is influenced, and he readily admits it as such. But the differences are substantive enough, and further, there is no intent to steal here. The basic crime of plagiarism is not being influenced, nor producing a sub-par copy (which most plagiarism leads to), it is appropriating someone else's work as your own. For Mr. Bierut to have plagiarized the poster in question, he would need to claim that original poster as his own. Similarly, Ms. Viswanathan's novel as an entire work is not plagiarized. She plagiarized passages of an earlier work that appear throughout her novel. Before you argue the unimportance of semantics let me point out the irony of that argument in a discussion about communication, design, and literature.
Moving on. Some of the commenters in the Observer fall on the same first-year philosophy class mistakes that we hear all too often regurgitated by solipsists and others who have had enough philosophy to get themselves in trouble, and not enough to realize it. That is, they argue that all thoughts have been experienced, and thus nothing is original. While a cute trope, it is both nonfalsifiable and nonverifiable, leaving us with a theory that has no content and yet submits that all other theories have no content, either.
There have been countless numbers of thoughts before we are born, and there will be countless numbers of thoughts after we pass by and burn to dust in the heart of a star. Does that mean that no matter what thought we have, someone else will have had that same thought?
No. It doesn't.
The stream of variables that produce the "I" that you believe is yourself is both innumerable and unique. Even if you firmly believe that only experience produces your particular consciousness, you must then recognize that you are constantly reevaluating and renegotiating the past in terms of your current experience. If this was not the case, we could never recognize the fundamental premise of the entire mystery/thriller genre (meaning, if your view of the past never changed, the "plot twist" would appear nonsensical on its face). Every experience you assimilate has an effect on the prior experiences you have assimilated, and so your memories of the past are always in flux. There is no absolute when it comes to the human mind.
Similarly, there has never been anyone who has had exactly the same stream of experience that you are currently in the midst of. Even identical twins wind up different after living their lives, which further asserts the primacy of the "unique" consciousness. So the mind that produces conscious thought is, one the whole, almost singularly yours.
The other half of the argument relates to the unconscious mind. It is, of course, unconscious, which relegates that same "I" mentioned above to a position of reactor. You cannot alter the content of the unconscious mind, and you are unaware of that content at the same time. Does that mean that you are simply at the beck and call of the unconscious? Have you been assimilating experiences without recognizing it, and thus mindlessly recreating those same influences while supposedly "creating"?
The beauty of that question is that you will never truly know a definitive answer. But the unique nature of the "I" suggests that even were you to be producing while influenced by the unconscious, and thus not wholly in control of your own creative power, the odds are fairly slim that the thoughts you produce will not be original. Even the archetypes we rely upon are reinterpreted and re-presented in original ways, even now. See the entirety of Quentin Tarantino's corpus of work for more on the juxtaposition and recreation of influence into wholly new narratives.
Unless, of course, none of this is original, and you've already thought it all before.