I found the following quote from Fred Brooks (of The Mythical Man-Month and the new The Design of Design fame) in an interview he did with Kevin Kelly (of Wired Magazine fame) .
Wired: You say that the Job Control Language you developed for the IBM 360 OS was “the worst computer programming language ever devised by anybody, anywhere.” Have you always been so frank with yourself?
Brooks: You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.
To many people this is one of those things that makes them say “duh”. However, it seems to me that the American education system still teaches students that making mistakes (i.e. failing) is a bad thing.
My point being: that even though this may seem like something that is obvious, it needs to be applied more often than it is to daily life, work, and education.
Another point that was made which I found interesting was…
Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?
Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.
I’ve never really thought about it like that… But it makes sense. Right?
Tags: design, Fred Brooks, interview, Kevin Kelly, Mythical Mon-Moth, Quote, Wired