I
Yes, thanks all hi everyone
So hello
Wow, it's filling up. It's a big room. It's my third IO. It's crazy. It seems so long and so short and so
So full of these experiences. I collected it I go and that I connect to IO. It's quite amazing
So welcome to the panel. The panel is called failing with style. I don't like panels particularly
So I thought if I do a page it should be one that cannot possibly go wrong
See what I did there
So whatever happens, it's all part of the plan and totally not part of the plan you will never know actually so
Can we switch this to my computer?
It's on one, okay
Yeah, I'm plugged in
No, this is all part of it
Yeah, it's starting yeah, yeah, I have a major it's it more a performance then
Yeah, it's like plugged in but
You're not seeing anything I'm I can detect again. There's a little sun here with our monitors and
There's there we go
Oh, yeah, but it's not coming up. Okay, hold on. You're number two then. Yeah, I'm number one. What's that? Oh, wow
Okay, that's our contribution questions at this
Yeah, so hashtag for the wind yes, um, sorry
Failure, let's talk about it. I mean, it's a cliche everybody talks about failure. It's important to fail, you know
failing early is super important fairly failing like
Often super important, but often it stays on that level that we say we frame failure only in the story of success
Like I tried this and it didn't really work
but then I came up with this really brilliant solution that totally saved us all and
So we thought we would like to take it a bit beyond that the discussion and talk about actual failure and different types of failure
different facets of failure I
Think failure has a lot to do and also facing failure with honesty, of course honesty towards yourself honesty towards your collaborators your clients
It can be difficult to be honest
Towards a commercial client, of course about failure and so there's a lot of interesting tension there
And I think the biggest tension is we all asked to do cutting edge
Never seen before work all the time and at the same time we cannot really take proper risk
We can take like fake risks, but we kind of fail
Usually in when you have a big contract, right? And so it's interesting how to frame that maybe how to wrap failure in a good way
And and so we have we mostly will share a few stories from that realm and and see see where we take it from there
So we're gonna speak in the order we
Seated here so West Grubbs from Pigeon Acti will start we have Fernanda Villegas
Who leads with Martin Wattenberg the big picture group at Google and Zach Lieberman, of course, you know Zach artist
teacher coder poet
And so on
So without further ado, I'm just here for like providing a frame
Hand over to us for the first few failed stories. Okay. The first failure is
Trying to get this now to switch to my screen because it's on two
So I'm pressing one
So the first absolute failure that I have done here is
Take part of the
is
You see that's that's mine. Hey, give me your dog. Shall we switch? Yeah
Mm-hmm style stylish race style
Okay, we can totally do this right totally. Yeah, I'm I'm ready to fail
Sorry everyone, this is this is our life
All you see is our portfolio work. You never get it here, you know, I did want a mirrored. That's why I did this
The funny thing is we actually
Tested this before
We did right it worked at home. I haven't changed anything. Oh, I changed
Okay, so my presentation, this is my very first my second failure the first one was
Our lovely display issue is that my presentation is this
And I can make an excuse I can say there's a lot of drama these last few days or the last
20 hours or so
Which is true, but again, that's just an excuse, but what I really want to go into
Is I want to show two projects and you can see I'm I'm not totally together here
But I will be because I know what I'm gonna talk about
I want to talk about failure that we've done with two different types of things one was
Saying yes to to a project that we knew early on that we should have not have said yes to
Sometimes saying no is hard, especially when it's 2008 and there's a recession
I don't want to show you that I'm gonna close this first. So you guys are looking up there. Um, it's 2008
We're hitting a recession
We start to get afraid when we have our own companies and we have mouths to feed
and
A client approaches us and and they offer us a job that we just feel inherently is not a really great idea
This particular client. I can't say the name
but I can say it was a health care ad agency and
One thing that I do want to make very clear with this. I'm not up here to rant on ad agencies
I actually have a history in ad agency fields
in the ad agency world and
in many ways where
the ad agency has has
Promoted the creativity that we're actually part of today. I mean when you really look back in the 60s and 70s the ad the ad agency industry is really
Contributed a lot to the creative world
So we're not here at IO to to trash on ad agencies, but we all have our own individual experiences and frustrations
I have plenty that I can say with with ad agencies that said so we were approached by a client and
They gave us this this job
And we said yes to it
Fear can make you really kind of make bad decisions
And it's really important to be very clear about what it is that you want to do
So we said yes to a project and the project was
This
Essentially, they they had data
And it was like an award document or it was everything was bad. It's red flags left and right
We couldn't say no and and it's like okay. We'll do it
And we actually designed this this is in flash as well
But it was back in the day when flash was still friendly
And we started building these graphs for them and first we did our own and which I don't have here
But this is where they want this is where they kept pushing us and we kept saying yes
And yes, look at these isometric bar graphs and scaled people at the bottom. This is all dynamic
So it was it was all look at this. They wanted a book
So you see our portfolio and you see you know our home runs
But what you're not seeing is our we have a lot of strikeouts, too
And that's that's part of being human. I think that's a really important aspect and we did this. Please don't take pictures
Now I just saw a camera up and I was like do not I
Will bathe in your blood
So we did this, you know, and it's just everything like the bar graph or the phones and it's
And we finished the project and it was like oh my god
And they were like we love it. We want more
We want more and at the next iteration, okay
We knew what we were getting into and I'm just gonna click through this very quickly
But we knew sort of what we were getting into so we're able to push a little bit, but we it was still very it's fluffy
I call this kind of work fluff
Because that's really what it is. So, you know, it's all in flash again. And so we use our skills
And many ways I would say our skills were somewhat
Prostituted in a if that's a word for this and these bar graph looked at the filling of the magnifying glass as a bar
That's awful
What happened in the end with this particular project is we fired the client
We went through another project and it kept improving a little bit and finally I got to the point of not being afraid anymore
And I said no you have some raw data on some very specific on an agenda that you have
We need to analyze that data. We need to analyze it for a couple weeks
You're not going to see any visualization at all
You're going to hear my recommendations and I'm going to find relationships within that data and I said take it or leave it
And I've learned that lesson from this project
I've said it ever since and it's really done us good in many ways. It's it's bought us a lot of freedom
But when the take it or leave it part came they had a creative director and she disagreed with that
And so there's a disagreement back and forth and finally I just said it's enough
You know we can't do this anymore and it was even interesting because the the lead the head the owner of that company
Fired that creative director and came back to us like no wait. I just fired her. I still want you and my response is really like
That's how you're gonna respond like I don't agree with that, you know
It's not like if your kid behaves you slap them, you know, and that's gonna fix the problem
I that that reaction alone was more of an affirmation of what was wrong
I'm gonna just talk very quickly because this is a second project
About a project that many people would say it was very successful for us
But at the same time there were plenty of failures with this as well
And I don't know if everyone in here has seen this or many people since it we did a visualization of every drone strike in Pakistan
and
I'll just play through this so it plays out and then I can show you what was wrong with it
We did this project on our own time. So about every year or year and a half at pitch interactive
We push all client work back and we say what do we want to work on? What's something that it's gonna help us feel
fulfilled
Where we can make all the decisions from beginning to end we do our own research and everything and so we did this we had
About four weeks to do it
And when it launched the first week was intense
I was expecting maybe the first day like 20,000 hits or something like that from our Twitter sphere and the networks
We had about 200,000 the first day
That by the end of the week it was almost a million. We were on Iranian news Pakistani news
I had people we're living Berkeley, California
So it's activist place, you know and people were knocking on our door and it was intense
Because we had shown drone strikes in a way that people have not seen it before so you see this intensity
But still there's so many parts of this that I'm so critical about that I want to go in and fix like these rollovers for example
Like we didn't have time to add these high-profile target images. Okay, that's fine
I can sort of accept that but but just the way the information is displayed here where you have the numbers inside the circles
It there's got to be a point where you just have to say it's it's okay, you know like not necessarily cutting corners
But let's get this to a point that we can accept
I might be still be very critical about it
But you you can't just work on it forever and ever and ever we all are met with our own constraints and limitations
But still at the same time
It was a
Greatly successful piece and most people probably don't pay attention to that kind of detail. We wanted to really get into the granular aspects of this
But we knew that going into that would just cost us so much more time to do that
At any rate that that's something that I would also define as
As failure in a way these points where you feel like you can't achieve something
You're not able to get to something and you just have to kind of let it go
And it was good. I mean, I'm glad that I did that and it's always there. It's interactive
So we can always go back and change it
And that's all so now cross your fingers everybody
Yes, that's me. Okay. All right, so when more it's
Invited us to participate in this panel. I started thinking about yes
I can think about many times when I work with Martin and the two of us looked at each other and we're like, uh, what do we do now?
this is a dead end and
We come from a tradition of research so in research
You're expected to fail, you know, you're gonna fail a lot of times because what you're doing. There's no answer
There's no right answer. You're just discovering stuff
But the thing I wanted to talk about today is not this kind of you were expected to fail failure is part of your work
It's more the kinds of lessons that we have learned that
We think of as real failures that we don't want to do again
And we try to take those as sort of guidelines for the kind for the work that we do today
And we hope we don't repeat them
So there are all sorts of different kinds of failures that I'm gonna very briefly touch on here
so the first one is this notion that
The amount of effort you put on something does not equal that the importance of that thing and you should
be
You should observe that in your own work, so I'll tell you what happened here
Martin and I were
invited to give a talk at the PDF the
Personal Democracy Forum in New York and that is a very cool
Conference that is sort of the leading edge for politics and technology and people who are engaged
And we were very excited that they were thinking about visualization
So we we really sort of wanted to do our best so we actually we got interested in Twitter and
How different hashtags were being used and sort of co-opted by different?
Political groups so you had like liberals would use certain hashtags
Conservatives would use other hashtags and that's sort of the visualization that you see here
and
We found one thing that we thought was interesting like the hashtag and PR was being used was sort of a pure was one of the
purest hashtags because it was only being used by
Democrats
But the conservatives were doing this really clever thing where they were using their own hashtags
But they were also using liberal hashtags, so it was it was a mess
But the point here is that we created this visualization that was sort of cryptic
It was very complicated to explain it. It took us a long time. We worked on this for a long long time
And it was really hard to come up with a story to tell
How do you tell the story of the data here? And we're like, oh, okay, you know, we need to give this presentation
That's what we have. We're gonna talk about this
Meanwhile in the back of our minds. We had noticed something else on Twitter, which is that the top trending
Hashtags usually are very very split
At least they were when we were looking at this
Between black authors and white authors. They're like, oh, yeah, that's interesting
So, okay, maybe we'll do like a little graph of it
And and this is the graph that we ended up doing which was, you know, a bunch of hashtags some of the top training hashtags
And you can see the breakdown between black blacks and whites
This is from random sampling
The point here is that this is a lot more interesting data than the thing I was showing you before
But we spent like, I don't know, an hour on this
versus months or weeks on the other on this thing here
And we felt we need really really needed to present this and
The black and white
Point was just an afterthought in our presentation
And that is really bad because this story is a lot more interesting than the other one
We were telling so I think the point is now, you know, one of the things we took from this is
Really let the guy let the data guide you and and if you can't if you're struggling with the dating
There's it's not telling you anything pay attention to that pay attention to what the data is telling you seems very intuitive
But sometimes you get lost on your own effort to do the best you can
This is a different kind of failure, so let me contextualize this
I'm about to talk about about one of our major projects, which is many eyes. I do not consider that project a failure
Okay, I actually really really like many eyes
But there are lots of things about many eyes just like Wes was talking about the drone strikes
There are lots. It's a big project. There are lots of things that happened in that project that I do think are failures
And so this is what I'm going to highlight today
So I'm putting many eyes on the right and here on the left is a screenshot of swivel swivel does not exist anymore
It was a startup and we didn't even know it existed. We were working very very hard on many eyes
Let me back up a little bit many eyes is a website. It exists to this day. It's free. Anyone can go there. It's public
Where anyone can upload data, create interactive visualizations of this data and share these visualizations with the world
So our idea was we want to democratize visualization. We don't want it to be things that you need to know how to program to use
We want anyone to be able to touch that technology
So we were working really really hard on putting together this website
And at the end of, in the end of 2006, swivel launched. We had never heard of swivel. Swivel was a website that did exactly the same thing as many eyes basically
What they wanted was to give you a way of uploading data, creating graphs and charts and sharing it with the world
We were like, who are these guys? What? Did anyone see this coming? We had no, we didn't
So a couple of things happened. One is that we were very scared because we're like, whoa, is the work that we're doing here even relevant at this point because someone just launched sort of the same thing
It was not the same set of visualizations. It was not our way of doing things, but it was the same idea
So that's one thing. It made us very very scared. The other is that it made us work very fast and that is the good part
It was, we launched many eyes a month and a half, two months after swivel came to market
The good part is that had swivel not happened, I think we would have spent the next six months working on many eyes and we would not be happy
So that's something to take into consideration is when do you decide that what you have is good enough and just let it go
And the forcing function for us was swivel launching, but hopefully we don't need another swivel to make us launch things in the future
So that's sort of one of the lessons we took. The other lesson for many eyes is be careful about the technology you choose
So we chose Java. Yes, that speaks for itself. So that's what you get today if you use a modern browser is what you get on the right there
So whenever I need, I want to demo many eyes. I have to go to a browser that can actually deal with Java. It's very sad
So that's one thing. If you are going to build tools, make sure that you are up to date on the technology and it's just part of what you have to do
The other lesson that we took from many eyes is this really interesting one which has to do with wordle
So everything you see at the bottom has to do with wordle and everything you see at the top is many eyes
Now, there's a little story here. So we worked to this day with Jonathan Feinberg, who is the creator of wordle
Jonathan was really interested and he's just like, I just want to create this playful thing that will create tag clouds that are beautiful
I'm tired of having tag clouds that look awful. So that's when he created wordle
But he was very smart. He did a couple of things that we never thought of on many eyes, which is he gave people a way of customizing their wordles
From the get go. You could choose colors, you could choose your font, you could choose if words were all going to be horizontal or upside down or whichever way
And he just gave them enough customization that it was both easy to use, but it was also powerful because people felt that what they were creating was something that they owned, that they created
As opposed to just going to a website and using whatever was there, the tools that you had created as a designer
He was also very clever in that he wanted from the beginning to allow people to print these things that they were creating
Whereas on many eyes, we were like, let's make sure everything is shareable, which it was, so you could very easily embed things and share
But we didn't really pay attention to printing. We're like, oh, yeah, we're talking interactive visualizations
And Wordle just completely took off, as I'm sure you all know, right? Regular people use it, children use it, the media uses it, it's amazing
And you have things like wall decor, you have people creating, you know, t-shirts and shoes and all sorts of things
So my lesson there, the thing that Martin and I kept looking at and thinking very seriously about is this notion of how can you give people just enough so that they feel creative themselves as they are using your tools
That's one thing. If you're going for, you know, massive adoption and very, very low barriers to entrance
The other thing is this notion of delight. How can you make sure that whatever your building is delightful to your users?
I think we took a very, very sort of scientific stance with many eyes. We're like, okay, we're going to upload data, we're going to show you the value of your data, we're going to let you have insights
And so it sort of shows in the way that we approached many eyes and the way that we created the visuals there. And so this notion of delight I think is a very important one
Finally, sometimes you get very close to your visualization and you think your visualization is very, very important
And you forget that the data sometimes is more important than the visualization itself. So what you're looking at here is not our work. This is something that was done at Google. It's called the Angram Viewer
And it's something that anyone can use. Anyone can go to the website and check it out. It shows you the popularity of a word in the English language over the centuries
It's all based on Google Books data. So Google is the only one who has this data site. And it's awesome because you can see the ebb and flow of language basically
When Martin joined Google, this was just starting. They were working on this project and we started talking to the group and they were like, yeah, you know, we were thinking about creating line charts
Would you be interested? And we were like, yeah, maybe. Let us think about this. But it never worked out. We didn't collaborate in the end
And part of the reason I think that we didn't collaborate with them is we didn't see the point of having a really, really special visualization
I mean, it's all a line chart. Except that the data is incredibly powerful and it was incredibly influential for all sorts of uses. Academics use this all the time to understand language and language usage and evolution
And so we were so set on what can you do with this data set to show it in a new way that we forgot that the data itself was extremely powerful. So sometimes, you know, simple is okay and it's good and it's the way you should go
I have two more things very quickly. This one is about placement. Oh, that's very dark. But basically the stuff on the left here is some work that I was doing
When I was at the media lab and I was interested in visualizing email and I really wanted users, users were very, very interested in this because it was personal data, it was their data, their conversations
It was years worth of archives of conversations. But one of the problems with this is that it was never integrated with any email reader
So it was sort of a self-contained visualization that you had to go use separate from your email. And that's a real problem. And I think more and more we're starting to integrate visualizations with products
I would like to see even more of that because it's really hard when visualization is an afterthought for something that we do every day
So the more we can integrate and I do think that that is a failure so far in general, it's hard to integrate. And so this is something that is very important to us
That visualization on the right is Google plus ripples and that is integrated into a product. But I have a different complaint which is it's very hard to get to
So, you know, being mindful of these things is important. And then finally, I have two very different visualizations here
I don't think that either one is a failure actually. I really like both projects. The one on the left is a visualization of Wikipedia
The one on the right is the wind map which shows the live wind over the US
The point I want to make here is that Martin and I pretty much almost gave up on both of these projects. They almost never happened
Because we were struggling so much, it was so hard to figure out a good way of visualizing the data that we spent literally, we had so many iterations that never took us anywhere
And so sometimes it's just really hard and that is okay. Just don't give up basically. That's where we went in
Thank you
Wait, you didn't cross your fingers?
Should I take it?
Let's do this again
Oh actually, wrong button
Failure for wrong button
So I'm up here. I'm actually considering if I should ditch everything that I was going to show you and go in another direction
I'm going to give you mixed messages, right? And the thing I'm going to show you, this quote I really love, you cannot prohibit the catastrophe you must surfeit
This is a Paul Verlio quote
And something that I take really dear to heart which is this idea of we're going to be surrounded by catastrophe, we're going to be surrounded by failure
We're working in this medium which is by its nature unstable. We're working with things that are recently possible and we're going to be surrounded by all of these things that can go wrong
And we should surf it. We should surf it. What do surfers do? They sort of hang out on the surfboard and they feel where things are going and they adjust
And there's a kind of intuition and it's just a patience and that's something, that idea
And on the flip side, there's this sort of pro-failure, let's celebrate failure
And on the flip side, I just want to say it's really important to say that failure sucks, like failure really sucks
And it sucks, like how many of you have been in failed relationships?
So why do failed relationships suck? They suck because you have invested time, right? You invested in time and part of yourself
Your relationship dies and you lose part of yourself, right? Part of your mental image, your idea of the world changes because you were with this person and growing with this person
And now you're no longer and you're losing something and that's why failure can be so difficult
God, which way do I go? Left or right?
Catastrophe God, I'm going to tell a story based on last night
I have this deck that's full of all this stuff, I'm going to go super fast
This is a letter to Andy Warhol from the Museum of Modern Art saying we don't want your drawing
I think this, it's great, this letter is great, come pick up your drawing
And this is the kind of stuff we're at a conference like this and this is what we're looking at, right?
You're looking at this kind of stuff, but actually it's this, what you're seeing on a day to day basis is like strikeouts
And last year I gave a talk and the talk was all about failure and things going wrong
And shaking hands and freezing and even this project that I did last year had all kinds of problems
Things going wrong, servers crashing and fighting against technology
I think I can talk for sort of infinitely about things going wrong
But I want to tell a story about my father
So I was studying abroad and I was in Groningen, I was an art student and my family decided to go to Paris
So I was in Netherlands and I met my family in Paris and we had this great idea which is that we would rent an apartment
And hang out in an apartment and sort of like live in Paris for two weeks
And on the first day my father was coming out of the bathtub and he slipped and he fell and he broke two of his ribs
And I was thinking a lot about this this morning because I was really like reliving that moment
And that's just such a terrible moment, you're in a foreign country, you break your ribs, you go to the hospital
And it's this sort of pain that you can't do anything, you live with it and you can't laugh
It's like the worst kind of illness because when you laugh it's painful
And we were living together, the four of us, my sister and my mother and my father
And my father couldn't leave the apartment and we would come back, like two of us would go out and explore Paris
And come back and tell him stories but we had to make sure our stories were not funny
And there was no humor
And I remember this moment and this is a really important moment in my relationship with my father
Which is we get through this two weeks and it's really a kind of ordeal, it's really difficult
And we're flying home, four of us are flying home and my father just starts to ball
Like he's crying on the airplane and people are looking like what is going on
People are looking, you know, it's really serious, like he is crying
He's like, you know, it's tough, it's tough and he's been, he had been sick
He has chronic disease, he has lupus, been sick for a long time
But it was like this sort of like major let down of being in this trip and having this thing go wrong
And I remember this moment where I put my arm around him and I said, you know, you're better than you've ever been
Right, because he's been sick for a long time and his lupus was in remission
I was like, you're better than you've ever been, you're better than you've ever been, you're better than you've ever been
And it was that moment, for us it was this moment where like, it went from him taking care of me to me taking care of him
And it was really this important moment in terms of being a son and being a father
But it was also this moment that I think is just important to think about failure which is how do we respond to it?
What do we respond to it? And do we have the people around us that will put their arm around us?
Do we have the hugs? Do we have the things that we need that take these moments and allow us to grow from them?
Because these are the things that we grow from
Wow, I mean that's been a lot of different stories and I think we've seen so many different facets of the types of failures we can go through
and what they can mean and I plan to summarize a bit what happened, but I know I have trouble
I have two pages of notes on all these different types of things that can go wrong
I think one takeaway message is surely the variety of things that can go wrong and on which levels and what that means for us
It spans this whole range from on the one hand accepting imperfection, I think that has been a recurring theme
that even thriving for perfection is the wrong start to begin with and the more we learn to accept imperfection mistakes and glitchiness
the more interesting also our existence becomes
the other thing is as sex at once failure happens how do we deal with that? I mean that's the main point to master this whole situation
and I had to think about yesterday evening as well because first we had this beautiful talk from Jake
like showing how brave they were in sort of reworking the whole workflow in the agency
by just facing the fact and that they realized themselves we have a flaw here in our whole process
and to be able to discuss that with the client and go back and say like listen we looked at that thing and I think we were wrong
and how often does that really happen and then in the second talk of course we have this catastrophic event that just comes out of nowhere
and it's really nobody's fault but then how do you deal with that and what do you take from that
and so there's this whole range of ways we can deal with failure and I guess the most important thing is just to look them in the eye
and turn them into something and transform them
so we have roughly five more minutes so usually Q&A is a bit difficult but we could try it out
we don't have an extra mic but if you have a question and feel comfortable like speaking up in this big room
we would be happy to take your questions
please
how do you feel like is a good way to approach somebody that's failing in projects specifically in like software development where people don't necessarily understand what the background is in that
you mean the reason, the underlying reason for the failure?
so like how would you guys support a student maybe for example that's failing
they do something and it turns out really terrible
how would you guys approach something like that because I think a lot of people take that very harshly
so the question is if you have a student or somebody else and you see them failing like how do you help them out
and how do you transform them into something positive
I don't give them hugs
so Martin and I just had this one experience actually last week
where we have a summer intern who just started a week ago
and we gave her a very specific project
and she's working very hard towards this project
and she decides to go on a route that is not exactly what we want
but we also want to give her some latitude to try out something
and then eventually she gets to a point where it's definitely not what we want
and so we basically had this meeting with her and explained to her you know let's think about this a different way
and gave her a couple of other options
and we could tell that she was a little bit okay I can go ahead and do this that you guys want me to do now
but I guess this doesn't mean at least I learned these other things
it doesn't really mean that it was a waste of time what I've done so far right
and we're like oh no it wasn't at all like this is how we work
you have to try a bunch of stuff and just you know and just having this very simple conversation
you could see her she was like oh thank you for saying that it's okay that I failed at this
and she was like yeah it's that's the way it works so I feel like if there's ever a situation
where you are working with someone and there is a turn where you know maybe give them some leeway
but then at one point really have this conversation and talk about other paths
and also saying that failure happens and it's part of the process and it's okay
I mean I think focusing on modesty that gives the ability for two people to listen to one another
you as the person trying to train them and then listening to you because confidence
and you see that especially with people who are starting you know they want to show that they're confident
and that's why they sometimes put their head down and they just want to run through the wall
and it's sometimes let them do that and then when they're done and kind of dust it off of them
okay this is what was wrong and now let's do something together we might fail together
you know but to have that attitude and sort of be a model of that modesty
yeah mix some success in and then you get through those tough periods
so the question was about the relation of striving for failure versus serendipity in your work
striving for perfection I'm sorry
I don't want to strive for failure
that's how I thought in the end it always turns out perfect
yeah you know I think the things that I'm really passionate about is our collaboration
and doing things like liveness and where things can really go wrong
like that's where I think the most interesting kind of art form is
that's where I think like the interesting part is
and so that is you're really like putting yourself on the edge of sort of instability
and putting you know the more people are involved the more systems the more things
the more sort of opportunities for things to go off the rails
and I think that at least for me that's been a really kind of important part of my creative practice
is to be in that sort of unstable territory
and a couple of things that I have learned that I think are important
I sort of missed to talk about in my talk which is like you
one concept I have is that you should be really okay to fire and rehire yourself
or like if you fail like this idea like mentally firing yourself is a really good activity
like what would it look like to fire yourself
you know like you did a good job but like we had to let you go
but then rehire yourself is also like that's a great moment right
so it's like kind of moment of like because a lot of times these things are self-directed
even if we have clients we're self-directing ourselves in terms of what we expect
and the other thing is something that I think other people on that panel have alluded to
and it's something that Chantel Martin talks about which is a kind of intuition
developing better intuition and really understanding
I think a lot of times failure is about making bad decisions
bad decisions about time, bad decisions about expectation, bad decisions about approach
and a lot of times we don't really know what it feels like to say yes or say no
like we don't know what it feels like and a lot of times we're not really in touch
like we're not in touch with how our body feels
you're not thinking about how your toes feel but you can think about what your toes feel like
so everybody in this room right now can think like what do my toes feel like
you know like you can get you can feel what that feels like
and there's a sort of I think a way to understand what it feels like to say yes
and what it feels like to say no and then make better decisions
and I think part of failing is understanding when you said yes
when you should have said no or when you said no when you should have said yes
I mean one note that I'll say to that sort of the epiphamy for me
what I feel is like a huge learning experience is that
what you say no to defines you just as much as what you say yes to
so sometimes trying to explain to people what I do
I start with explaining to them what I don't do
and I think that's really an important thing to understand
is there's the negative space that defines the positive space
and there's got to be that balance
and that's where we have to sort of master like where do we draw the line
and where will we not go past and why and understanding that
it's experience it is failure that defines that for sure but
I'm thinking in terms of perfection
one of the things that we try to do is
we try to be very honest with ourselves about what we're getting
out of the work that we're doing
so for instance when we have some data set
that is really hard to grapple with
and we have some easy way of visualizing it at first
we'll try that way and if it works great we're done
but most of the times it doesn't
and I think we've developed this sort of
not a technique but we have this process where we're like
okay if this visualization isn't giving me what I need
or it's not allowing me to ask any interesting questions
we're not there, we're definitely not there
it's not that we're striving for perfection
because we don't even know where we're going
but it's more of the really be honest with yourself
what are you getting out of what it is that you're doing
and so we tweak it, we change it, we create a new technique
or something and it's very clear
it's become very clear for Martin and I
when we feel like we have hit an interesting spot
because the visualization becomes something we want to play with
and we just don't stop playing with it
and so it's not necessarily perfection again
but it is something that you just want to spend time with it
and you just want to play and point and call the other person and say
look at this, isn't this amazing
and I feel like that is, we strive for that
we don't always get that but this is what we strive for
yeah, connected that to that point that you cannot
value something just because you invested time in it
and I think that's the hardest thing to learn
that things don't get more valuable
just because you spend so much time with them
and to learn just to not talk to them pretty
just because you're so attached
I guess we can take one last tiny little question
then we have to wrap it up
a question for Fernanda specifically
what would you say the takeaway from the swivel vs. many-eyed situation was?
so my takeaway was that swivel was one of the best things that ever happened to many eyes
because I don't know how long we would have spent there
I do think that in the end
so the swivel vs. many-eyed situation reminded me of something that I heard once
Mark from Facebook talk about
which is, I think he was offered a billion dollars or something for Facebook
very early on and he said no
and this was when Friendster was all the rage
and everybody was like everybody pays attention to Friendster
and he was like it's okay
we're working on a better product
and that's what we're gonna do
we're gonna continue to work on it
and once we had to be very, again, honest with ourselves when we were working on many eyes
look at what swivel was doing
look at what we were trying to do
and the tools we were developing and say
okay, how can we do the best work we can do
but launch, launch fast
so it made us all of a sudden focus like a laser
and get the stuff done
and prioritize
and the thing that is really interesting to me
is that looking back
we would have these never-ending discussions
about things that we thought were really important
no, this needs to look this way
the conversation needs to flow this way
and now we look back and we're like
that was so not important
it's like we don't even remember the things we were thinking
we're so huge
and so I feel like just distancing yourself
just really being very clear about what your priorities are
can do wonders for a complicated project
and then time also gives you a lot of perspective
Thanks so much
I mean, thanks again for all this great different perspectives
I think it's still blended together really well
my head is full
and I have learned about all new kinds of failure
I can now practice
Thank you very much. That's the best part.
