One sure way to ensure failure in your designs is to only pit them against imaginary forces made up in your mind before releasing them into the world. I once had a professor who taught me this lesson in a very tangible way. He taught a furniture design course in which students would design and build a piece of furniture. I chose to design a chair. We drew up designs and made scale models. We were then instructed to build a full-scale prototype out of inexpensive materials that had similar properties to the ones we would use in the final piece. This allowed production methods to be learned and kinks to be worked out in the design before expensive wood or metal was cut which couldn’t be un-cut. We spent hours building these full-scale prototypes. I glued my chair up and came back the next day to try it out. “Just fine. Fairly comfortable,” I thought, as I sat my light frame on the chair and gingerly leaned back.

I brought the chair to a scheduled review with the professor and we looked it over together. He came to one particular joint in the chair between the top rail and back post, one of the two long pieces in a chair running from the ground up to behind your shoulders. He examined it for a minute and then grabbed the two pieces and started pushing and pulling on them and broke the joint – the joint I had just spent hours learning how to create and then cutting, gluing, assembling, and admiring.

“I know it is not easy to see that,” the professor said. “Just think about a big guy sitting down in your chair and CRACK! that wood splintering. A joint designed like this isn’t strong enough, and now is the time to know that. You need to come up with another way to do this that can handle the stresses which will realistically be put on the chair.”

In the moment I definitely didn’t appreciate him breaking the chair, even though it was just a prototype. But I realized that he was right, so I went back to the drawing board and redesigned that particular joint. Looking back I’m so thankful that he taught me this lesson in that manner. I’m not sure I would have seen the dire need to make a change without the failed product in front of me.

In a similar way we are sometimes blind to the real stresses that our products will see in the world. We think we have reality in our minds and we pit our designs against this fiction, maybe even in a thorough and deliberate way, but it is still only a fiction. We must test them against reality. Don’t let your designs become so precious that you won’t let them fail. If you do this you are only ensuring future unexpected failure. Make prototypes and test them in as realistic scenarios as possible. Get other eyes on the prototype and have them try to break it. Find those trusted voices who, like that college professor, have an eye for what forces your design or product will encounter in the real world, and listen to them when they tear your stuff apart (literally or figuratively). And if ever you find yourself on the other end of that picture, as one with a voice speaking into another’s work, acknowledge the effort that went into it, but then show them where it fails – it will be a gift in the end.

A little side note for local folks who may have known the professor: his name was John Hass. He was one of those professors you really looked up to. He was a master of any tool in the shop, wood, metal, you name it, and he could teach you how to use it. He had kids doing CNC milling, vaccuum bag clamping, and traditional joinery. He even owned a bar where he collected old arcade games. Legend. He died young from a brain tumor, just a few years after I took his class.