Failing honest
DLB kicks off a week-long discussion about failure with a meta-blog post about glitch and responsibility.
Mistakes are made. Technology fails. Deadlines are blown. Variables are left unaccounted for. In short, shit happens: unavoidably, inevitably. But what do we designers do when it does?
This week on BlogLESS, we’ll take a look at some instructive instances of failure, and see what we can learn from them. We’ve talked up the importance of accountability in design ethics here on BlogLESS before, and anticipating failure and accounting for it gracefully is right at the heart of good design.
I thought I’d start our week looking at a couple of beautiful images that were generated inadvertently as the result of a technical failure, a glitch in Firefox. I chose to do this for two reasons.
You may have noticed that BlogLESS has been a little light on the substantive content these last two weeks. We’ve been so busy with our clients that we haven’t really been able to post anything like our normal fodder. So yeah, the first reason I’m showing you these images is because it’s easier to throw up some pictures than it is to organize a thought.
However, this somewhat vulgar reason belies a deeper and more relevant one. BlogLESS is our responsibility. We’re slammed with client work, and don’t feel like we have time to write, but our organization is committed to this blog six days a week. This means that when our priorities collide, we have to design solutions that accommodate our competing duties. This blog post thus is itself a kind of glitch — when my time management failed, I had to improvise (and you know I love to get meta).
What’s the lesson here? I think it’s this: If you can’t fail gracefully, you’d better fail honestly. There’s nothing more mortifying than listening to someone who’s obviously failed try to tell you how they really succeeded (the old "it’s not a bug, it’s a feature" bit). Or worse, lashing back at you for pointing out their failure.
Inevitably, we’re all going to phone something in that we shouldn’t. But a bad judgment call doesn’t make a bad designer. Much trickier on that score is the way we handle ourselves when we’re called to task for our failures.
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