There are thousands of case studies where design leads to success. But what about the cases where design leads to failure? These cases get swept under the rug and never talked about. So we never learn.
I was inspired by this when reading Jonathan Baldwin’s post about designers needing to take responsibility for the fault of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. Imagine what might be learned if the design discipline treated this case like engineers treat a bridge collapse. By revealing failures and causes, a discipline can actually gain public trust.
For my part, I enjoy talking about failure. It’s a part of what I teach during the Design Strategy day for UX Intensive. I used a case of failure in my talk about Strategic Experience Design. And one of my favorite case studies of design gone wrong is Pallotta Teamworks (full case study, 1.5Mb PDF).
Surely other designers fail sometimes??? If you know of other cases, please tell me. I’d love to read about them!
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April 3, 2008 at 3:59 am
Peter Jones
Brandon - Good timing on this post, people are thinking about this subject in the light of the massive and very public failures of public services (Heathrow), institutions (Wall Street dealer/brokers), and the occasional product or two. My case study of the UX role in the failure of two large software vendors was just online this week in Boxes and Arrows: We Tried to Warn You (part 1 and 2): http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/we-tried-to-warn-you
Part of a B&A series being written by the panelists following last year’s Information Architecture Summit panel organized by one C. Crumlish. Joe Lamantia’s excellent failure article was published in 2007.
Cheers, Peter