Main conference presentation

Lessons from failure: Or how IAs learn to stop worrying and love the bombs

Christian Crumlish, Peter Jones, Lorelei Brown and Joe Lamantia

Monday March 26 2007, 11:45 - 12:45PM

It's not unusual at conferences to present triumphant case studies about projects that succeeded spectacularly well and the reasons why they did: meaning the stern but judicious stewardship of the brilliant, kindly, insightful, charming presenters whose work deserves the claim sure to be heaped upon it in the days to come.

This will be a different kind of panel. We are going to talk about failure, and not just failure in the abstract but specific situations, specific projects, in which we have personally failed. Furthermore, we are going to refrain from blaming the stakeholders and clients for these disasters. We are going to own our catastrophes and we are going to talk about what we learned from them and why we are doing better information architecture today because of these painful, harsh lessons.

But it won’t be a pity party. We see the humor in our own failures and we expect to get the audience laughing early and often. If we can’t laugh at ourselves then what good are we?

We expect a lively panel with a great deal of audience involvement. We hope that by breaking the ice and airing our own dirty laundry, we will encourage the rest of the people in the room to come up to the microphone and tell hilarious and sad stories of projects that went south.

Each panelist will address a different level of failure: the project level, the organizational level, the institutional level, the global level and each has different insights into why projects fail, to what extent failure can and cannot be prevented, and how failure is an inevitable by-product of creativity and experimentation.