It seems the topic of failure is coming up a lot lately in the design blogs I read. Perhaps we’re all collectively dreading our Q1 reviews.
Lame joking aside, this passage resonates right now as Maggie and I are building up her bookbinding empire, which is arguably a design process within a business context. As we experiment with different ideas, layouts, or plans, we’re “recognizing accidents” all over the place as a result of our past experiences. I never thought of it in those terms until today.
Nancy Skolos remembers that one of her teachers used to say, “A good failure is worth a lot of mediocre successes.” To varying degrees, we carry this sensibility through into professional practice. For example, Jonathan Hoefler says, “Increasingly I think about the work that I do not so much as a directed effort, but as the ability to recognize accidents and interpret them productively. Even failures have their place, since without them there’s no progress: anything that’s truly ‘experimental’ has to run the risk of failure.”
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