22 November 2019
The Friday lecture focused on using failure as a tool in the growth and development of our practice. Failure could be anything from an error, a mistake, losing, an accident, a crisis.. However, improvisation from the situation of failure, could be a great learning experience.
We discussed in groups, our experiences of failure in the past. I realized, that under the pressure of being perfect, the fear of failure had failed me as a student at school, and even sometime into college. When I started to take risks in my academic projects, I realized that my goals were different from what society imposed on me, and started to really enjoy my work whenever I let go of the pressure of expectations. This made me think about relative failure, or relative success, as being highly individual feelings, based on one’s aspirations and passion, as opposed to societal constructs.
Adam stressed on the need to experiment and progress, as an exercise in failure, for creative development. However, doing something with the intent to fail, like Micheal Landy’s Art Bin, might end up being a superficial practice, as a shortcut way of achieving the fruits of failure.
We discussed the Roland TB – 303 synthesizer as a commercial failure when it was introduced in the market, but later being acknowledged as a useful tool, which was probably ahead of its time when it came out. I was inspired by such products and ideas that could potentially ‘change the scene’ around a field, yet had to undergo an initial period of scrutiny, suspicion and underestimation to finally get their due.
I was inspired to create a catalogue of materials, techniques and happy accidents for my project, based on the idea of a Catalogue of errors described by Adam.
design factory 