Just hearing the word "failure" is enough to significantly raise anxiety levels in creatives. For many artists, designers, and performers, failure is an outcome to be avoided at all costs. This isn't the case for Amrita Datta, a designer and Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at Herron School of Art and Design. She recently shared why she isn't afraid of failure, and why she actively encourages her students to embrace it.
HERRON: At a recent panel discussion, you said that part of your job as a professor is to be there for students to fail, and that one of the most important parts of school is that it provides a safe space for students to fail. Can you elaborate?
AMRITA DATTA: In any subject, you're coming to school to learn, and learning does not come without failing. As professors, we need to create a space where students can feel comfortable failing and learning from that failure. Learning is what creates growth, and one way you can learn is from making mistakes.
If you're doing everything perfect, then there's nothing to correct and there's nothing to change in any way. We don’t live in a perfect world and we will make mistakes. We can learn from those mistakes!
HERRON: I think a lot of us these days are afraid to fail—we’re afraid to let people down or look bad. What would you say to somebody who has a fear of failure?
AMRITA DATTA: I think first you need to feel safe within yourself, and that comes with a lot of learning and understanding of your own identity as a person. You also have to be eager to learn from failure. You could fail and just give up. Or, you could fail and then keep improving. You just need to have patience for the improvement to happen.
One thing that I talk about in class all the time is about the mistakes that we are making as a class so we can learn from each other’s mistakes as well as our own. We learn best from our friends, and from actual situations. I can keep saying in the classroom, “Don't do this, don't do that, don't do this, don't do that,” but that won't matter as much as when a student learns from a given situation.
HERRON: Why is it important to fail in school specifically?
AMRITA DATTA: College is an experimental space. It’s your chance to try new things and to fail. You won't get a chance like this again. The stakes are a lot higher at a job in terms of failure. So you want to take the opportunity to learn the things that will help you do better in school while you have the chance.
As much as you might want to do the safe design so that you don’t fail, safe design won't make you experimental. You have to push yourself to do something different. Otherwise, you're not learning anything new.
That's why I teach classes like cross-cultural design that makes us all step out of our comfort zone and get in touch with reality, and with the histories that have created these realities around us. All of this can help us learn and do better in the field as a designer, as a social person in the world, and in our lives.
