Embracing Failure: Your Design Mentor

 Over the course of my design experience, I have heard a lot about what it takes to make a successful product. I have been tutored by great mentors from successful industries and from academia, all of which have imparted a little of what they think is required for a great product. And under their tutelage and through my own experience, I have started to formulate my own philosophy (as well as design a few products, a couple of which have been patented and licensed). I have begun to realize what I believe is vital to the creation of a successful product. 

What does it take to make a good product? Failure. 

That may sound counterintuitive, but I have come to know that failure is one of the most essential parts of the design process. Learning how and where and when the product will fail while designing it allows the designer to know how those failures can be mitigated in the end product. Fail, and fail early, and fail often. The data learned from failure is often more useful than that developed from success. Failure is a part of many aspects of design, from learning how you fail as a designer to the failure of the design of a product itself.

In the development of a product, I have been highly influenced by a lecture I heard by Theo Jansen, the creator of the Strandbeest, the kinematic-chain walking sculptures. He said that his failures, his mistakes, what didn’t work, speak to him. They influence his design process and the creation of his sculptures. In the end, the design is not just his own, but also the design of his failures. That has profoundly changed the way I look at design. Every attempt, every proposed solution, every prototype and every model, whether they work or not, contribute to the design. The failures, if analyzed correctly, can tell you as a designer what to do to create a better design. The best product will likely never be the first thing you think of, but a composite of a good idea, a lot of work, successes, and failures.

Stranbeest sculpture the Suspendisse. [1]

I was once on a team designing a foldable drone. We worked and designed what we thought would be a great and innovative solution. Then came the day of our first, full-prototype flight test. What we learned during that one testing session and from all the failures accelerated our design forward. As a team, we made more progress in the design in the week after the flight test than we had in the previous month.

Product development is very analogous to optimization techniques. Finding a global optimum requires taking a lot of steps, most of which will be non-optimal, or even worse than the current state, but are important steps in understanding and exploring the design space. A designer needs to be okay with taking steps, getting poor results, and understanding that it is not a poor reflection on them as a designer, but rather valuable feedback on how the product can and should change and improve. These data ensure that future steps are going in a positive direction.

This brings up another important principle in design, don’t bury or hide your failures from others. You need feedback. Feedback comes from critical reviews from others, other designers, management, manufacturing, the market, etc. Critical feedback from others can be hard to take. Negative reviews of your design can feel like personal attacks on you but don’t take them that way. Don’t get defensive. Learn how that feedback can make the design better. Learning what the market doesn’t like about your design will help ensure that the final product is something desirable. More input from others will improve your output as a designer. It is hard to show off a design that you have put a lot of effort into and then receive a negative response, but good designers take that feedback and use it to make their product better.

Part of being willing to fail as a designer is being willing to accept when you don’t know what you need to know to make a design great. This could be recognizing that you don’t understand the market or the needs of the customer. Assuming your view is the correct one can lead to assumptions that can be fatal to the end design. The market needs to have a presence and influence on the team, even if it isn’t a person sitting in on the meetings. Also, understanding the limitations of your knowledge as a designer will help you understand when you need to outsource, when your intuition may lead to bad assumptions, or when and what you need to (or can) learn in order to properly design a given product. I once worked on a consulting job where we were hired because the company’s engineers assumed they had the expertise to make the product and their intuition led to some fundamental flaws in the final design. We were tasked with fixing the design after it had been released. It would have cost the company far less if the engineers had realized they didn’t have the knowledge they needed and asked for other’s help before the first production run. A team that is made of many people, with the skills necessary for the product at hand, becomes a good product development team.

If I could tell my past self anything about product design, it would be this: Fail and fail often. Learn to take that critical feedback from others and not let it get personal but let it propel the design towards that optimal solution. Recognize the limits of your expertise so you can be open to the knowledge and help of others. The sooner the failures happen, the sooner the design will reach its full potential. I hope there is something from what I have learned that can help you in your future work. If you take anything away from my experience, I hope it is to help you embrace what has come to be one of my greatest mentors in design: Failure.