Failure as a skillful act

The potential to fail exists within all our endeavours. Although we may take steps to mitigate against it or limit its likelihood, the possibility of failure can never be entirely removed. Yet, while failure may be something we feel inclined to avoid, geographers have sought to reveal its productive capacity. In this article, I take this position a step further to argue that failure can itself be part of skill. Within the article, I narrate my own encounters with failure during the Living Quiver Project – an effort to re-design pieces of archery equipment to foreground their agential vitality. I reflect on three encounters – each mapped onto a different design in the project – and seek to show that failure, far from a hinderance, became a critical component of the design process. Drawing together literature on skill, failure and craft, the article illustrates how failure gave presence to my materials, encouraged reflections and expanded the skilled ecology of my practice. Through this, I argue that failure need not be something to ‘overcome’ and that where we endeavour to develop skill, we should also be making space for failure to be permissible.