Masters of Industrial Design

Review: Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failures, and Lessons Learned.

Design Disasters: Book cover from Amazon.com

A newcomer to the design field might be misled by the title Design Disasters:  Great Designers, Fabulous Failures, and Lessons Learned.  The scale of the words “disaster,” and “fabulous” may lead one to believe that the failures outlined in the book are notorious enough to be included in the dictionary entry for “failure.”  Within the first few pages however, the reader is reminded of something he or she should already know; that failure is highly personal, and that perception of its magnitude changes over time.

From this perspective, the book offers much guidance and inspiration for young designers, including an imperative from Debbie Millman, who describes her failure as settling for “commercial security over artistic freedom” and pushes us to “Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time.  Start now.”  Although such candid self-assessments and advice are sometimes intimidating, the tone of many essays is upbeat and encouraging, and at times quite funny.

Contributors include a variety of designers, writers, artists, and musicians, who write about “design and failure (and failure by design and failure with design and design failures (made by) designers.)”  Readers may recognize the names of some contributors, such as Debbie Millman, Richard Saul Wurman, Stefan Sagmeister, and Marian Bantjes.

Descriptions of failures occurring in childhood, during schooling, in business, and after much recognition and accomplishment all express the same feelings of horror, shame, and the necessity of getting up and trying again.  Steven Heller, editor of Core77 writes, “It takes intestinal fortitude not to be devastated by failure and then to do real soul-searching and find the proverbial silver lining.”  More than one author describes looking back on their worst failures to find they were actually quite decent and that their best work was not as stellar as they once thought.

The collection of essays, some of which have appeared previously in other publications, alternately give lessons in design and life in general. Design fundamentals such as the notion of iterations, the importance of the model to show failures before they become costly, what to expect when working with clients and deadlines, and the importance of a good design education are covered.  Of life in general, the reader is reminded that failure’s sting comes from recognizing yourself in your failures, how getting serious about failure is a way to plan for a career and the future, and how failure makes you grow as a person.

Several authors describe historical failures and put them in a greater context, including the initial failed designs for Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and the widespread use of synthetic estrogen among pregnant women in the 1950’s, which may or may not have given male baby boomers more feminine traits, influencing the peace and social justice movements and creative explosion of the 1960’s.

The varying authors, tones and topics make for a bumpy ride, especially when reading several essays together.   Some pieces are intensely earnest and discuss severely personal matters and tragic outcomes.  Other essays are comically anecdotal, give a lighthearted treatment of famous people and failures, or admissions such as “Man, what a piece of crap I just made.” Yet a book of just one of these types would never work, and the essays mesh to address the difficulty of failure, give hope, and a little something to help us laugh at ourselves and carry on.

The reader is left with an understanding that because design is fundamentally about human beings, and designers themselves are human, the profession is set up for failure. In the face of so much ambiguity of what is success and failure, more than one author raises the question of “Why do work at all?” The answer: in the end that is all we can do. What we learn from this collection is that the effort to attempt to make something better, and to keep trying, is inherently decent and worthwhile.  That we are just trying to make something of ourselves and may never be satisfied with our work is made a little easier by reading that even a notable, “successful” designer admits that to produce something he must “…bang my head against the wall every which way until something begins to ooze out of the nothingness and surprises me. If one day I ever do finish something that I’m 95 percent or 99 percent satisfied with, I might just throw in the towel and retire to Belize.  That would surely kill me.  Thankfully, I am still unsettled and happily dissatisfied.”