I think part of being a designer is to fail every day, to try things that don’t work out. In a way, every project fails every day until it succeeds! That’s what the iterative process of design is about. The projects that don’t launch, this is sometimes due to the fact that they’re too early but that doesn’t mean they don’t come back a few years later as ideas integrated in different projects. Timing in many ways is key.

~ Yves Béhar, from Yves Béhar – The Talks

I’m reminded of the idea of one’s discard pile. Béhar’s work can fail (the idea of success versus failure in trading with others is baked into the way we use the word “work”), so he’s aware of “failure” as a salient feature of his creative efforts. Here on the ‘ol blog, this isn’t about “work” so it’s not possible for it to “fail.” But I do often think about the discard pile: I don’t actually create blog posts and then discard them rather than post them. But I do often read and find things, imagine what I could post about them… and then I don’t post it.

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