{"id":3345,"date":"2016-03-15T14:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T18:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/?p=3345"},"modified":"2016-03-11T17:46:58","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T22:46:58","slug":"scarcity-abundance-and-finding-your-own-way-to-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/2016\/03\/scarcity-abundance-and-finding-your-own-way-to-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Scarcity, Abundance and Finding Your Own Way to Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CC Sally Oh via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s run an experiment and see what happens.\u201d I say these words at least twice a week with complete freedom. Not just the freedom to take the risk, but the freedom from being attached in any way to the outcomes. Sure, I have my hunch. I\u2019ve been doing this awhile, after all. But in this scenario, my expertise counts for very little; I am not the audience, and the audience is the expert in finding new and creative ways to confound me. The secret is that this is what actually makes it exciting.<\/p>\n

An organization where you are free to run as many experiments as you need to, to test and iterate out in the world in full view of your audience, to blow up something that\u2019s been proven effective on the chance that something else might work even better, sounds like creative utopia. As the executive director of a 10-year-old, all-volunteer participatory community library, I get to experience this every day. In my day job.<\/p>\n

I work as a user experience designer for websites and apps, where generating ideas for the sole purpose of watching half of them fail (and then watching the next generation of ideas replace those that just succeeded) is not only the job description, but part of the culture. We celebrate the failures because it means we made a leap, we overshot, we pushed the button for the future and the elevator just wasn\u2019t ready to stop on that floor yet.<\/p>\n

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I revel in my failures as a designer and why they can be so debilitating as an executive director and founder. Why temporarily disappointing users is what I get paid for and why the prospect of disappointing our community is a paralyzing jolt straight to my heart. I think a lot of it comes down to the cultural conditions around each.<\/p>\n

Design & Tech Conditions<\/strong>:<\/p>\n