02.02.14 – 27.04.14

FAIL BETTER

The goal of FAIL BETTER was to open up a public conversation about failure, particularly the instructive role of failure, as it relates to very different areas of human endeavour. Rather than simply celebrating failure, which can come at great human, environmental and economic cost, we want to open up a debate on the role of failure in stimulating creativity: in learning, in science, engineering and design.

Curators

Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh - Curator of Fail Better

Lynn Scarff - Director Science Gallery Dublin

Highlights

Exhibits

Featured

WHEN THE WHEELS COME OFF

During the Hungarian Grand Prix, the carbon fibre left rear suspension of the 2003 Ferrari Formula One car failed while braking…

THE WRONG BOOTS

I don’t like heights and I don’t like climbing but despite this, I decided to climb Mount Everest in 2005…

THE WALKIE TALKIE BUILDING

“The building with more up top”…

THE THIRD POLICEMAN

All remaining stock of the book, was burnt down by the Luftwaffe in 1940…

THE NEONURTURE

Every year over 4 million infants in the developing world die within a month of birth…

THE MARS CLIMATE ORBITER

The Mars Climate Orbiter was a robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11th 1998…

THE K1 SYRINGE

HIV would spread via unsafe injections like a bush fire.

THE ICE PICK LOBOTOMY

Would an ice pick driven through the eggshell thin bone above your eye into your brain cure your ‘maladies’, your ‘melancholy’, your ‘madness’?

THE HUMBLE FUSE

When too much electric current surges through a circuit, it brings the risk of damaging expensive equipment…

THE FIRST RASPBERRY PI

Back in 2006, a group of us at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory…

SUPERMAN’S WHEELCHAIR

Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen; the explorers who carved those first trails into the Antarctic ice…

SAMUEL BECKETT—ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT DRAFTS OF WORSTWARD HO

For Beckett, failure was the ultimate goal of art.

REUSE

Should electronics be designed to fail after a defined period of use?…

RADIOACTIVE MOONSHINE

On April 16th 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s reactor number 4 blew up after a cooling capability test…

OLYMPIAN

by Sonia O’Sullivan…

MAUVE

The accidental invention of the colour mauve was made in 1856 by William Perkin.

FORCEPS

In 1976 I undertook the world’s first fallopian tube transplant…

FIXPERTS

more obviously inspiring examples of failure…

APPARATUS FOR FACILITATING THE BIRTH OF A CHILD BY CENTRIFUGAL FORCE

In 1965, George and Charlotte Blonsky, a married couple living in New York City, were granted US patent #3216423 for an “Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force”…

2,000 DYSONS LATER

The design process depends on new ideas, failed experiments, and incremental improvements…