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The Museum of Failure opens in Sweden.

The Museum of Failure opens in Sweden.

Whether it's Dewey's famous articulation of "Failure is instructive" or IDEO's more recent "fail often to succeed faster", there is a unique relationship between the process of design and learning from failure.

In design, the intention is (usually) that such failure takes place in the design process - those 99 failures should be kept in a cupboard so that the 1 brilliant solution can impress humanity for decades to come.

But now and again there are examples of designs that should never have been. Hence the Museum of Failure, which recently opened in Helsingborg, Sweden:

Inside the Museum of Failure from NBC Left Field on Vimeo.

Of course, there are many other online resources collecting design failures around the world and don't forget Søren Rosenbak's Design Research Failures website is still going, one of the DRS Student Bursary awards in 2016.

Whether the designs in the Museum of Failure represent design or innovation failures, flawed genius or exceptional catastrophe, we leave to the reader to decide.