Simone Giertz came to fame in the 2010s by becoming the self-proclaimed “queen of shitty robots.” On YouTube she demonstrated a hilarious series of self-built mechanized devices that worked perfectly for ridiculous applications, such as a headboard-mounted alarm clock with a rubber hand to slap the user awake.

But Giertz has parlayed her Internet renown into Yetch, a design company that makes commercial consumer products. (The company name comes from how Giertz’s Swedish name is properly pronounced.) Her first release, a daily habit-tracking calendar, was picked up by prestigious outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art design store in New York City. She has continued to make commercial products since, as well as one-off strange inventions for her online audience.

Where did the motivation for your useless robots come from?

Simone Giertz: I just thought that robots that failed were really funny. It was also a way for me to get out of creating from a place of performance anxiety and perfection. Because if you set out to do something that fails, that gives you a lot of creative freedom.

You built up a big online following. A lot of people would be happy with that level of success. But you moved into inventing commercial products. Why?

Giertz: I like torturing myself, I guess! I’d been creating things for YouTube and for social media for a long time. I wanted to try something new and also find longevity in my career. I’m not super motivated to constantly try to get people to give me attention. That doesn’t feel like a very good value to strive for. So I was like, “Okay, what do I want to do for the rest of my career?” And developing products is something that I’ve always been really, really interested in. And yeah, it is tough, but I’m so happy to be doing it. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, as much as there’s a lot of face-palm moments.

Giertz’s every day goal calendar was picked up by the Museum of Modern Art’s design store. Yetch

What role does failure play in your invention process?

Giertz: I think it’s inevitable. Before, obviously, I wanted something that failed in the most unexpected or fun way possible. And now when I’m developing products, it’s still a part of it. You make so many different versions of something and each one fails because of something. But then, hopefully, what happens is that you get smaller and smaller failures. Product development feels like you’re going in circles, but you’re actually going in a spiral because the circles are taking you somewhere.

What advice do you have for aspiring inventors?

Giertz: Make things that you want. A lot of people make things that they think that other people want, but the main target audience, at least for myself, is me. I trust that if I find something interesting, there are probably other people who do too. And then just find good people to work with and collaborate with. There is no such thing as the lonely genius, I think. I’ve worked with a lot of different people and some people made me really nervous and anxious. And some people, it just went easy and we had a great time. You’re just like, “Oh, what if we do this? What if we do this?” Find those people.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Queen of Useless Robots.”

This chapter focuses on the creative risk taking involved in educational design and is an exciting collaboration between DER member Prof Michael Henderson and 12 senior Educational Designers embedded centrally and within 9 Faculties.

Educational designers regularly engage in a process of creative risk taking. Inevitably, some designs result in degrees of failure, which need to be productively managed. Surprisingly, creative risk taking and productive failures are rarely discussed or studied in the field of educational design or educational technology.

Through the analysis of educational designer narratives we identified that there is a broad aversion to openly acknowledging the risks and failures. This was partly due to a drive for narratives of success by institutions and education in general, combined with the often precarious positions of the designers themselves who work in a “third space” beside and between educators and students and who therefore have to establish and sustain the trust of those who they work with.

In this chapter and our subsequent work we have identified seven strategies for educational designers and institutional leaders to promote changes in practice:

1. Normalize failure: acknowledge failures in every creative success; actively create time to reflect on practice as a habit; leaders at all levels to role model productive framing of failure.
2. Recognize the emotional labour of failure and vulnerability in engaging with it: acknowledge that it is hard to talk about failure; leaders need to show vulnerability and role model this too; embed emotional intelligence in reflective practice; recognize that educators are often in vulnerable positions as well, feeling at risk in revealing themselves to educational designers.
3. Involve others and resist internalising failure: include educators, students and other diverse perspectives in the design and reflection cycles; adopt or build a supportive community that engenders the sharing of vulnerability and candour.
4. Position failure as part of a process: adopt a designerly mindset – finding solutions is an ongoing cycle of design and redesign; define the role of educational design as a creative endeavour, in which failure is explicitly framed as a possibility.
5. Purposefully build trusting and candid relationships over time: encourage candour through adopting a welcoming and accepting approach to problems, needs and concerns.
6. Question the validity of success criteria: leaders at all levels need to be critical of measures of successful educational design such as grade outcomes and student satisfaction which are usually confounded with competing factors.
7. Revise the language surrounding the work of educational design: leaders need to frame the position descriptions, strategic directions and outcome expectations to include concepts of iteration, experimentation, trialling, prototyping and productive failure.

This study reveals that failure is both an inherent risk in creative educational design work, but failure can also be productive.

Below is a poster presentation of our research – offering the seven strategies themtically organised into three themes of strategic action: shaping expectations, redefining processes, and supporting people..

Citation:

Henderson, M., Abramson, P., Bangerter, M., Chen, M., D’Souza, I., Fulcher, J., Halupka, V., Hook, J., Horton, C., Macfarlan, B., Mackay, R., Nagy, K., Schliephake, K., Trebilco, J. & Vu, T. (2022). Educational design and productive failure: the need for a culture of creative risk taking. In Handbook of Digital Higher Education (pp. 14-25). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800888494.00011