Was my design ripped off?

Have you ever designed something that you put your heart and soul into and later found out someone was taking credit for your hard work? This is common place in the architecture and design fields where citing sources is seldom practised. Unlike most other scholastic fields that must follow strict ethical principles of citing sources (bibliographies and such) the design fields follow a more informal approach where there are few rules as to piracy and theft of design from other designers. Why is this? Well... so much of the architecture and design fields function off of a daily rip off of others ideas during the design phase, it is part of the lifestyle of designing. A designer is constantly seeing others ideas in magazines, coffee table books, etc, etc. The designer may not even be aware that he/she is pirating an idea, for this visualization is often internal, or that their new contribution to the idea/design makes it different or unique. So this sort of thing is really part of what it is to be a designer or architect.
However, mischief and deviousness begins to occur when a designer knowingly takes full credit of a design when another designer was active in the same project they they built upon without citing that designer. When this sort of lack of respect and ethos occurs it turns the world of design into yet another world of abuse and scandal opening up a can of worms. Once a designer has been violated in this fashion he/she becomes cynical, and guarded. It is at this point where they often become secretive, bound by legal contracts. The openness of the design world as an art form loses the transparency, the collaborative process and trust that once made it a unique and wonderful field.
Perhaps some of the most savage purveyors of such mischief are the egotist architects/designers who believe that it is not necessary to acknowledge those who actually build their projects(elitists). Sure their concepts give rise to a product, but it is the craftsman, the everyday labor that goes into the building that makes that project come to reality. It is with this sort of disrespect that makes individuals guarded, jaded, and disconnected. I have witnessed this sort of separation in the world of design and construction. It divides the builder from the architect/designer and in the long run creates dysfunctional relationship.
In the end we work should work together on projects. The project is only as good as its weakest link, it is through respect of the collaborative process and the individual that all links are strengthened.