This is not the first time I heard someone say “it’s okay to fail.” I have always been told that as long as you learn something from the failure, it is okay to fail. But honestly, I would still rather not fail at all. I always thought that phrase was something that is easy to say but hard to put into action. In fact, I don’t like a failure so much that I would rather not try if I knew I was going to fail.
However, as I applied to be part of the course, I knew that I would need to have a different mindset if I were to be a part of it. When designing and creating something, you are bound to fail. I believe that if you don’t fail while creating, you most likely did not take enough risk. There is probably nothing innovative about it. Even with this understanding, I knew I would have difficult time coping with failure.
As if the professor knew this challenge that I was facing, learning from failure was one of the mindsets that we learned when the course began. However, it was the same thing that I heard before – how we should celebrate the lesson learned from the failure. But I wanted to hear more about it. I needed someone to convince me that you can eventually achieve success by learning through failure. This week, the professor invited Michael Hansen from EarthSense to do that exactly.
Michael shared about his journey through a startup business called EarthSense. The company creates a small autonomous vehicle that the farmers can use to collect data on the traits of the plants in the fields. Currently, they have a working model that can successfully collect the data for the farmers, but in order to create a working model, he had to go through many failures, especially during the design phase of the product. He would design a prototype, test it, learn about what is working and what is not, reiterate the design, and continue the process.
What I found interesting in his presentation is that in a way, he was telling us that there is a “correct time” to fail. This so-called correct time is when the product is in an early prototyping stage. The reason behind this is that the earlier you fail, the smaller the cost of failure is. Thus the reason he was telling us “Fail early, fail often.” I appreciate this mindset as he was saying that it is okay to fail early since the cost is low, but as you reiterate and continue the process, you should fail less and less. To me, that is more convincing than simply saying that it is okay to fail as long as you learn from it. Yes, indeed learning from failure is vital in creating a better design, but at some point, you should stop failing, right?
3D Printing for the First Time!
During the second part of the class, we had an opportunity to get into a team, come up with a name for the team, and design a logo to represent it. Just coming up with a name itself was already challenging for us. As soon as we gathered as a team, everyone, including myself, was claiming how bad they are at coming up with names. To solve this problem, we started throwing out what we were working with throughout the project in order to get inspiration: accessibility, affordability, wheelchair… and then one of the team members got it. ROTAM. It means wheel in Latin, which we thought was perfect since our goal is to improve the wheelchairs somehow. We even came up with a design immediately. We were going to have ROTAM with the O replaced with a wheel of a wheelchair. Unfortunately, due to the time constraint, we could not transfer that exact design into a 3D printed model.
It was very exciting for me to see that the 3D printing worked. The whole process felt more realistic now that I had an experience going through the designing, transferring the design into software design, and 3D printing the design to have a tangible model by the end. Although it will be way more challenging to do this for a wheelchair part that can actually be used, I am excited to see the potential that it holds.
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