Gearing to talk about why designers fail and what to do about it is Scott Berkun. Berkun wrote, “Making Things Happen”, “The Myths of Innovation” and “Confession of a Public Speaker”. He also was a manager for Microsoft from 1994-2003, team leader on WordPress and his works have appeared in Wired Magazine, New York Times, Forbes Magazine, Washington Post and many others.
Everything we do is design, even if we are not conscious of it. Writing a poem, painting something beautiful or even writing lyrics to a song, these are all in fact design. Design goes in further that organizing your desk space, training your employee or even organizing a corporate baseball team is considered design.
Are you a designer of some sort? Then you fail. All designers fail about 95% of the time. That just means that when you first arise to your design, plan, or draft, generally it won’t be the final product. Failing isn’t a terrible thing. Once we fail, we recognize our mistakes and construct better solutions or concepts. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, built on July 1, 1940 collapsed on the morning of November 7, 1940. The obstacle was the bridge was built with shallow plate girders instead of strong trusses. Wind can bypass trusses but girders impede the wind. This resulted in the bridge to actually sway back and forth at 42 miles per hour winds. With this failure though, it created the current Narrows Bridge to become a success and also allowed engineers to understand the obstacles that stand in the way for suspension bridges.
Thinking outside of the box can stimulate ideas. Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with designs so it’s better to just shift items around and play with ideas and concepts. The Rubik’s Cube helps demonstrate thinking outside of the box. When we were children and couldn’t figure out a solution to the cube, some of us would take apart the cube and put the pieces back together. No instruction is given that we couldn’t do that! It’s just a matter of seeing another solution to a problem.
Most of us fall into the design trap and this is a major roadblock to get to the final outcome. In the book, “How Designers Think” by Bryan Lawson, he comes up with four design traps.
1. Category: obsessive taxonomy
2. Puzzle: problem solving for its own sake
3. Numbers: believing what’s measured is all there is
4. Drawing trap: love the sketch more than what it represents
In order to get to that perfect design, we must experiment and fail continuously and learn from our mistakes. Understanding what we did wrong and how to get that final product is a process we must all accept as designers.
