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Every Eruption Starts with Friction
Innovation is often narrated through success. We remember the products that reached the market, the buildings that were completed, the companies that grew and the ideas that transformed entire industries. What tends to disappear from these narratives are the countless projects that failed, remained unfinished or never progressed beyond the prototype stage. Yet if we look carefully at the history of design, architecture and innovation, a different picture emerges. Progress rarely follows a linear path. Many of the most meaningful developments originate from mistakes, abandoned directions and unresolved processes. Failure is usually presented as the opposite of success, but in reality it is often one of its essential conditions. The history of creative practice is filled with examples where value emerged not despite failure but because of it. Every project leaves traces behind. Some become products, others become lessons. Some become cultural references long after their original purpose has disappeared. Understanding these invisible trajectories requires shifting attention away from final outcomes and towards the processes that generate them. What appears successful on the surface is frequently the result of years of experimentation, correction and uncertainty. Like a volcanic eruption, the visible event is only the final manifestation of forces that have been accumulating beneath the surface for a long time.
“Exhibiting failure does not necessarily mean taking sides with success or experimentation, but analysing the logics that guide design, revealing the hidden paths and mistakes from which good intentions emerged.”
This perspective was central to Failures: Process Beyond Success, the exhibition presented during Fuorisalone 2016 and curated by Elisabetta Cianfanelli, Francesca Tosi and Giuseppe Lotti. Rather than celebrating finished products, the exhibition focused on unsuccessful projects, interrupted processes and unrealised possibilities. The objective was not to romanticise failure but to understand its role within innovation itself. By shifting attention from results to processes, the exhibition challenged one of the most persistent myths in contemporary culture: the belief that successful outcomes are the only meaningful measure of value. In reality, every innovation contains a hidden history of discarded ideas, technical limitations and unforeseen obstacles. What we eventually recognise as success is often only the visible portion of a much larger process.
The Value of the Unfinished
The relationship between failure and value becomes even more apparent when observing projects that remain incomplete. Contemporary culture tends to interpret unfinished work as evidence of inadequacy, inefficiency or abandonment. Yet incompleteness often generates meanings that finished projects cannot. Across Italy, unfinished buildings have become part of the landscape. Originally conceived as symbols of progress, many of these structures never fulfilled their intended purpose. They remain suspended between construction and ruin, existing in a condition that is neither complete nor destroyed. What makes them interesting is precisely this ambiguity. Detached from their original function, they become open to reinterpretation.
The collective Incompiuto Siciliano was among the first to systematically investigate this phenomenon, describing unfinished public works not simply as failed infrastructure but as a distinct architectural condition. Their research proposed an unexpected question: what happens when a project continues to exist after its original objective has disappeared? Rather than treating incompleteness as a defect, they examined its cultural and aesthetic consequences. The result was a radical shift in perspective. Failure ceased to be understood exclusively as absence and began to be viewed as a form of transformation.
A similar attitude can be found in the work of Dutch artist Bouke de Vries. Trained as a conservator, de Vries became interested in objects that had already been damaged beyond traditional restoration. Instead of attempting to erase the traces of breakage, he incorporated them into entirely new compositions. Fragments of porcelain, shattered ceramics and broken decorative objects became the raw material for sculptures that celebrated rather than concealed imperfection. The crack was no longer a defect requiring correction. It became evidence of history. Destruction became part of the narrative.
The Korean artist Yeesookyung approaches the same theme from another direction. Her celebrated Translated Vase series is composed of ceramic fragments discarded by master potters because they failed to meet technical standards. These rejected pieces are reassembled into entirely new forms using visible seams of gold. What was originally considered a failure becomes the condition that makes the work possible. Without the broken fragments, the final object could not exist. The project transforms rejection into creation, demonstrating how value can emerge from what initially appears unusable.
Looking across these examples reveals a recurring pattern:
unfinished projects generate new interpretations;
abandoned structures continue producing cultural meaning;
broken objects become material for new narratives;
failed attempts often reveal possibilities hidden from successful ones;
the process frequently outlives the original objective.
Failure, in these cases, is not an interruption. It is a transition.
Pressure Beneath the Surface
The tendency to hide failure has become increasingly common in contemporary culture. Social media, corporate communication and popular narratives often present innovation as a sequence of achievements, removing the uncertainty that accompanies every meaningful project. Yet the history of design suggests something very different. Every product, building or organisation that survives over time carries within it a history of adjustments, revisions and mistakes. The final result conceals a much larger landscape of possibilities that never reached completion.
The designer Katerina Kamprani explored this idea through her project The Uncomfortable, a collection of deliberately dysfunctional objects. Chairs that cannot be sat on, watering cans that spill water in the wrong direction and tools that fail to perform their intended purpose expose something fundamental about design itself. By observing failure directly, we become more aware of the assumptions that usually remain invisible. Dysfunction reveals structure. Error reveals intention.
This principle extends far beyond design. Scientific discovery, technological innovation and cultural production all depend upon experimentation. Most experiments fail. Most ideas never become products. Most proposals remain unrealised. Yet these apparently unsuccessful outcomes continue to generate knowledge. They reveal limitations, expose assumptions and create new directions for future exploration. Progress depends not on avoiding failure but on learning from it.
A volcano provides an unusually accurate metaphor for this process. What we perceive as an eruption is only the visible culmination of movements occurring far below the surface. Pressure accumulates gradually. Different layers collide. Friction generates energy. Long before lava reaches the surface, transformation is already taking place underground. Creative work follows a similar pattern. Every project contains hidden tensions between ambition and feasibility, experimentation and practicality, vision and limitation. These tensions are not obstacles to creativity. They are its fuel.
The most interesting organisations are therefore not those that avoid mistakes. They are those that develop systems capable of learning from them. They understand that uncertainty is not a sign of weakness but an unavoidable part of discovery. The path towards meaningful innovation is rarely direct. It is shaped by detours, interruptions and incomplete attempts. Every eruption has a history that remains invisible to most observers. Every breakthrough contains traces of previous failures. What appears sudden is often the result of years of accumulated pressure. Seen from this perspective, friction is not the opposite of progress. It is the condition that makes progress possible.
Sources & Further Reading
Elisabetta Cianfanelli, Francesca Tosi, Giuseppe Lotti
Failures: Process Beyond Success, Fuorisalone Milano (2016)
Incompiuto Siciliano Research Project
Bouke de Vries, War and Pieces
Yeesookyung, Translated Vase
Katerina Kamprani, The Uncomfortable