Failure is key to success
September 22, 2021
“Failures are to be encouraged—actually, they shouldn’t be called failures: they should be thought of as learning experiences. If everything works perfectly, little is learned. Learning occurs when there are difficulties.”
- Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
When we fail at something, we get demotivated and feel clueless about what contributed towards our failure. The consciousness to identify why we failed makes us better designers. It gives us the opportunity to improve existing design.
According to David Kelly, Stanford professor and co-founder of the design firm IDEO, we should, “Fail frequently, fail fast.” This gives us more time to test our designs and find out which part does not work and what can be done to improve it. This process of constant refinement and enhancement of design is called iteration.
We as designers cannot design a product just as per the requirements of the consumer and launch it for usage. We thrive to master the design by prototyping and testing them to improve loopholes. With every cycle of testing and refining, the design becomes closer to the actual product. Thus, failure should not be taken negatively but celebrated as we can improve the design/product before the consumer uses it.