Sometimes things break… as designers we take a lot of pride in our design process and our creativity, we believe the things we design will never break.  But when we create something and it breaks, our first initial instinct is to learn from it, throw it away and build it again. Why? Why don’t we use what is broken to make something else? Something new?

Everything that is designed will break eventually which in turn tells us all designs are flawed; when a design breaks it no longer fulfills its purpose meaning it is broken. Why don’t we anticipate things to break and on that anticipation design it to do something after it is “broken”. Everything has a shelf life but what if we designed it to not have one. What if we gave it a secondary purpose? Once it has lived out its primary objective it has another chance to be used for something else.

I was walking down the road listening to my music and I saw a small child holding something that he had made out of Lego. As he was walking he tripped and the Lego creation broke into pieces, the child then continued to pick up the broken off bits of Lego. What do you think he did when he got home? Throw it all away, rebuild the exact creation or make something new? But this got me thinking; Lego is amazing. You build something out of nothing and then it breaks.  You are constantly creating new objects out of old ones, new ideas out of old ones too. Why don’t we use this in our design process? Just because something is broken doesn’t mean we have to throw it away, it could be used for a different purpose; it just requires the right type of thinking.

We all know everything breaks but no one designs what to do with it after.

Should we be designing things as if it was Lego as if it has a secondary purpose, a potential to be something new? As designers we have an obligation to design things to our best ability, surely adding this design process gives us that opportunity. But then how do we anticipate something to break in a certain way, surely that would mean we would have to add weakness in our design to let it have another strength. I guess it is just deciding whether that strength outweighs the weight of that weakness.

Seeing that child drop what he had once created, and seeing the potential for it to be something different gave me this epiphany. We should try to give our designs more of a purpose, to give them the potential to be something different. Everything breaks eventually but we shouldn’t see things as broken, we should see them as challenges, as new opportunities, and as new ideas.