Designing for Failure, Not Success
Originally written: 06 July 2020
Designing for Failure States in Safety-Critical Products
Most products are designed for when everything goes right. We’re designing for when it doesn’t—and in a year completely shaped by COVID, we suddenly find ourselves with the quiet time and space to do that work properly. At this stage, the testing process for MyHerculead is shifting entirely toward failure-state behavior. We are looking closely at what happens when two large dogs surge simultaneously, when a handler's grip completely slips, or when someone's physical balance breaks mid-step. The easy success cases are no longer interesting to us. The recovery paths are everything.
This deep focus reframes our entire philosophy of system mechanics: we choose graceful failure over perfect performance, stability over speed, and predictability over cleverness. That specific shift is exactly when products stop being mere objects and finally start being tools.
— Elysia
