from the “celebrating our failures” dept

This is from a design/marketing/communications company’s website. I love how they’re not afraid to showcase ideas that didn’t fly:

Think of this as the final resting place for ideas that – for one reason or another – lacked sufficient postage. The road to change is littered with them.

You can’t have innovation without failure, right? I’d love to see libraries celebrating their failures more. If you know of a library that does this, let us know in the comments!

This is a brilliant idea!

I can’t provide any library examples, but as a bit of a poster buff, I can point you to a couple of design studios that present the ‘rejected’ designs along with the final. In many cases I prefer a rejected design: usually more arty, less commercial.

http://www.allcitymedia.com/posters/page/1
http://www.helloevery1.com/entertainment/theatrical/quad-film-posters/0/1/

While I think this is a lovely idea in theory, I just don’t see libraries doing it. As much as I would love them to! Public libraries are funded with public money so I’m sure they might see this idea of celebrating “failed ideas” as too close to celebrating “public money wasted”. You know what I mean? I’m not agreeing with that rationale, I’m just putting it out there as one possible reason why were not seeing more libraries do this.

Maybe Academic libraries have more latitude with something like this? I work in a public library and don’t pretend to understand how academics work but perhaps there is less need to be wary of being seen to be wasting money in an academic environment (sorry that was an akward sentence!). Just a thought (but like I said, I don’t know much about academic libs so I could be totally off base).

Thanks for posting this though Amanda. It’s gotten me thinking at least!

my, your URLs are quite lovely.