25 Baffling Design Choices Found in the Wild (November 6, 2026)

JR Atkinson • Writer and Editor

Nov 6, 2026 10:00 AM EST

Can a design failure teach us something about why failure is good for us?

Failure is a huge part of everyday life. It's a big reason to get out of bed in the morning. It's one of the first things we learn how to do as humans; in fact, it's the reason we learn to do anything at all. Think about learning language. We make sounds and imitate and get things wrong, and the way people react to them teaches us the difference between right and wrong. It's why babies are so absorbent- they're always failing. But when we get older, we start to attach a stigma to failure. We start getting self-conscious about it, when it's really the most important thing we can do for ourselves. An article from Big Think about the benefits of failure argues that we should aim for a "failure rate" of "roughly 16 percent." If you always succeed in everything you do, it means you're not pushing the upper limits of what you might be capable of. It might be embarrassing, and it might be painful to fail, but it's definitely crucial. Anyone who goes to the gym knows this to be true. If you're not pushing to the point of the burn- even if that means dropping the weight or falling out of a balancing position- then you may never know what your potential is. We get so afraid of making a fool of ourselves or seeming bad at something that it can stop us in our tracks. These design fails teach us that that's all okay.

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We might think of failure as a thing we'd like to avoid, but sometimes celebrating it leads to much better ends, and can even make you laugh. Take this group of images, for example. They've gone so far wrong that they actually delight and entertain us. They failed at their initial goal, but they succeeded in the tertiary result of making us laugh. And laughter is super important to the way we approach the world. It's vital for keeping us on track and keeping our heads in the game. If we can't have a lighthearted attitude about things, then what can we do? We need things that break up the day and remind us that it's good to get silly every once in a while. So that's what we're here to do today, regarding these images. They're here to make us laugh and to remind us that failure is a good thing.
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