We talked about our failures—individual, structural, institutional, societal—and not just “failure” in the abstract, but specific situations, specific projects, where we personally failed. We also strove to hold back from blaming stakeholders and clients for these disasters. We owned our catastrophes and spoke about what we learned and why we are doing better information architecture today because of these painful, harsh lessons.

Each panelist addressed a different level of failure: the project level, the organizational level, the institutional level, the global level, but we all talked about why and how we fail, to what extent failure can and cannot be prevented, and how failure is an inevitable byproduct of creativity and experimentation.

With four panelists and a room full of fellows, we felt we only scratched the surface. In the welcoming pages of Boxes and Arrows, we can really let it all hang out, so we are starting a series of articles on failure. We begin with the four case studies we presented in Las Vegas, but also, we hope to include your failures and the lessons you learned. Contact me or one of the B+A editors if you’d like to contribute to this series.

On the panel we worked from the micro to the macro, but here we are going to turn that around and start with Joe Lamantia’s observations about enterprise-level failure and some intriguing parallels from the catastrophic failure of an entire society.

“Take it away”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/it-seemed-like-the, Joe.