Design Experiences as Pathways for Embracing Failure

Abstract

Abstract There is a growing movement in engineering and industry for students and practitioners to learn to embrace failure and develop resilience. The design process is naturally full of iteration and failures that can inherently be leveraged as learning opportunities for students. This study establishes a set of failure-related interventions implemented in an introductory design course, and then examines potential links to students’ experiences and attitudes towards failure. These interventions included a failure-themed “speaker seminar” series, a virtual gallery of design mistakes (“mistake museum”), and the introduction of a prototype logger for students to intentionally reflect on each iteration of their own design projects, including what went wrong and what was learned from the iteration. Students found these interventions to be effective in gaining perspective on failure and learning to embrace it. Students’ perceptions of the openness to failure of the class, perceptions of the field of design’s openness to failure, and perceptions of their major’s openness to failure all changed significantly, while their perceptions of their own openness to failure and their academic institution’s openness to failure were unchanged over the duration of the design course. Students also self-reported that the reflective processes of logging prototypes made them feel more comfortable with failure.