It's hard to learn when things go well. When a project goes as planned dissecting what contributed to its success is like explaining how to make a cake. Take the flower and the sugar and the milk and the eggs and mix it up and bake it. The ingredients and the process rarely reveal what makes the sum of the parts so delicious. There's an elusive magic to success.

When a project fails it's easier to identify the points of weakness. It's a missed deadline here, lack of communication there, failure to consider a certain factor. But these are technical mistakes. It's when a project technically works but experientially misses the mark it's hardest to understand why, to learn from failure.

Last months' edition of Wired was all about failure. One of the articles that explores the neurobiology of failure really caught my attention. Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, conducted an in depth study on how science gets done. He noticed that the majority of the time the most carefully considered experiments don't work out. His curiosity peaked by this phenomenon, he started to focus on situations  when the results of an experiment don't match the researchers expectations and how they react to this failure. Dunbar observed that researchers consistently assumed any results that didn't align with their hypothesis were technical errors, a dirty test tube, a faulty measurement, the wrong chemical. Almost never did the scientists think their original assumptions were wrong.

Dunbar hypothesized that this penchant for ignoring factors which contradict our beliefs is a  psychological fundamental; he conducted a series of experiments where he showed subjects a video of something which they knew was scientifically innacurate but that looked logical. A certain part of the brain fired censoring the logical in the face of knowledge or belief. He showed that our minds' only see what they want to and censor the rest.

The question becomes, how to overcome this blindness and learn when things don't go as planned? For us at the MDM this question is fundamental to our learning experience. We are in a unique situation where we are working with real world clients while still in an educational environment. There is a total committment to getting things done. Finish on time and on budget - ensure the technical execution is perfect. In a three month development cycle that means that production takes up the majority of the time while design and pre-production is secondary. And although we implement a system of production, agile development, which allows for continuous design and iteration throughout the production cycle the nitty gritty nevertheless becomes the focus. This sometimes results in a situation where a project is executed exactly as planned but somehow misses the mark. Doesn't have that 'aha' moment or is lacking that extra creative spice.

How do we deal with failure blindness? How does good science, the science of invention and understanding deal with it? Dunbar noticed that most new scientific ideas emerge from lab meetings. And specifically meetings that involved experts from various disciplines. In interdisciplinary labs researchers were forced to re-explain their fundamental knowledge or understanding to others. This process of re-imagining and abstraction necessary for explanation catalyzed problem solving. Explaining things to others, working in teams, is the resistance to our mental Statsi.

Fortunately, the structure of the MDM is ideal for this type of process. All of our teams are interdisciplinary. Engineers explain things to artists, designers to project managers, writers to animators; it's during this process that deeper understanding of one's own craft emerges and we break each other's mental filters. 

Ryan Nadel is a second year student in the MDM program