Designing failures.
“Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try Again.
Fail again.
Fail better.” — Samuel Becket
One of the great things about studying Product Design Engineering at GSA is that many of our tutors are designers in the real world. The last couple of years we have had assistant tutors who taught us part of the time, and worked in design consultancies in the rest of the time. This year we have had Matt Marais with us, and it was great to hear him give one of our Design & Technology lectures.
Matt, himself a former PDE student, has worked on a number of projects since graduating. As he went through and told us about them all, one of the things he was keenest to express was that failure is ok! He wanted to encourage us to take risks. Unless you’re super lucky, and unfortunately Felix Felicis isn’t real (so no luck there, ba dum tshh!), success doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen that naturally. Success is born out of many failures.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison.
A trendy word at the moment is ‘startup’. New companies, fresh out of the block. Small companies. Many of them are enjoying lots of success in silicon valley and places like that. Why is that? What is it about these small companies and this startup culture that makes them do so well? Don Norman says this:
“Most radical ideas fail: large companies are not tolerant of failure. Small companies can jump in with new, exciting ideas because if they fail, well, the cost is relatively low.”
Most startups fail. Reading on the internet, especially places like Medium here, you would be tempted to think that’s not true. The failures just don’t get much publicity. The truth is that they fail lots, it’s just a fact. But that’s ok. Failure isn’t bad. It shows you saw a potential future, took a risk, and tried. You can learn lessons which will make your next product more likely to succeed.
In his book, Don Norman talks about a startup called Fingerworks. They were trying to develop an early touch surface that would be reliable and affordable and could distinguish between multiple fingers. They almost quit because they were running out of money. But then Apple bought them. And now ‘multi-touch’ screens are everywhere. Gestures are used for everything, it seems obvious, but it wasn’t at the time.
Don’t give up, failure is there to help us learn. There are all sorts of reasons you might fail that aren’t related to your product being bad. It just takes a lot of perseverance and hard work.
