«… designers [...] are judged more by their hits than by their misses. [...] Designing without fault is impossible,» wrote Henry Petroski in his Small Things Considered. Why There Is No Perfect Design, 2003.
Many of those who are interested in design and museums, sooner or later, wonder how a show dedicated to the design failures could be like, assuming that it could be fascinating, telling lots of histories of design that usually remain hidden as the other side of the moon.
In 2010 Peter Hall, design critic, and senior lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin, gave an acute lecture on the topic, going through different kinds of failures – such as the successful failure of Starck’s lemon squeezer.
«We don’t need to justify design’s importance to the world or the art establishment: We need to look into how it works and where it’s going wrong. We need a new generation not to venerate design, but to sniff out failure» is the conclusion of Hall.
Watch the lecture on vimeo. The lecture has also been published in “Abitare” magazine, issue 508 (English version / Italian version).
[By the way, for those who want to sniff out failure, and get closer to how failure can “work”, a masterful example comes from the analysis conducted by Paul Atkinson, A Bitter Pill to Swallow: The Rise and Fall of the Tablet Computer, in “Design Issues”, 2008.]
