With our recent internship program coming to its conclusion in August, I find myself quite happy knowing I’ve given our interns at IDE Interactive a safe space to fail and grow.
Having been through an internship myself (unpaid, nonetheless) and hearing stories from friends back in college who had successful and not-so-successful internships, I wanted to take a moment and share how I framed and structured this internship program to help people grow.
Of course, this will be one of many blogs I’ll be writing about the internship program, so keep a lookout!
Not Everyone Knows What They Don’t Know
When working on teams, whether at other companies, under someone else’s supervision, or with your own team, we often forget that not everyone knows everything. We don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why the internet exists. If we were perfect at solving every complex problem without thinking of it as a problem to begin with, we’d be the next generation of AI (I’d also like to believe we wouldn’t even need AI at that point!).
Everyone has a knowledge gap, whether it is small or big. We don’t know what we haven’t encountered yet. This is the beauty of working on different projects and expanding our horizon and knowledge base. The more experiences we gain, the easier it becomes to navigate the unknown.
But let’s talk about that unknown a bit more. How does one improve their skills for challenges yet to come? By experiencing more of the unknown. Yes, I know I said that in the last paragraph, but it’s true!
The more experience we gain in life, the more tools we have at our disposal, and the better equipped we become to handle new situations. As designers, it’s impossible for us to know every user experience issue unless we’ve encountered it in some shape or form. Do you remember when ADA compliance wasn’t as big a focus? I sure do.
This reality of knowledge gaps brings us to an important question: how do we create environments where people can safely encounter and learn from the unknown?
Creating Safe Spaces for Discovery
When facing the unknown, we have to create spaces where we can discover, learn, and experiment. The problem with the unknown is that, well, it’s unknown. We need to understand what we’re walking into, why we’re walking into it, and what we’re trying to solve.
For our interns, this meant starting them on client-adjacent projects without defined timelines. They could explore, make mistakes, and iterate without the pressure of a looming deadline breathing down their necks. This wasn’t busy work. It was real work with real impact, just with built-in safety nets.
The key is creating an environment that not only allows for discovery and learning but also actively encourages it. This approach makes feedback something that can be applied right away, creating brief moments in projects where learning lessons can be taught and knowledge can be exchanged.
But how do we structure this learning within these safe spaces? That’s where our framework comes in.
Fail Fast, Fast Forward, Fail Proudly
The best way to learn in a fast-paced environment is to embrace three principles: fail fast, fail forward, and fail proudly.
Fail Fast means getting to your mistakes as quickly as possible to get the answers you need. Even the answers you don’t want guide you in the right direction. Instead of spending weeks perfecting something that might be fundamentally flawed, we encourage rapid prototyping and quick iterations.
Fail Forward means failing intentionally with the purpose of learning from your mistakes to improve. It’s not about being reckless. It’s about taking calculated risks where the learning value outweighs the potential setback. We gave our interns permission to experiment with new design approaches on lower-stakes projects, knowing some wouldn’t work but trusting the learning would be invaluable. If we knew why something didn’t work but our interns didn’t, we encouraged them to create it anyway so they could understand the process while we dissected and explained it.
Fail Proudly means owning your mistakes and sharing what you learned with the team. When you fail proudly, you find the answer you’re looking for or get guidance on how to reach your goal. More importantly, you help others avoid the same pitfalls. Our interns presented not just their successes, but their failures and what they discovered along the way.
These three principles might seem counterintuitive, but there’s solid reasoning behind why this approach works so effectively.
Why This Framework Accelerates Learning
This framework works because it promotes the one thing everyone is afraid of: FAILING. Everyone is so afraid of the “F” word, but you shouldn’t be. Failing is human nature. We get curious, we learn, we fail, we get up and try again until we succeed.
Some skills can’t be learned via copy and paste. Some skills require failing at them, picking them apart, and understanding them to be able to sharpen and develop them. Design thinking, problem-solving, user empathy—these aren’t things you can memorize from a tutorial.
If we succeed the first time in one go, what lessons do we actually learn? We learn how we did it, maybe, if we’re lucky. But if we’ve failed multiple times? Well, guess what, we know various ways not to do it, and more importantly, we understand why those approaches didn’t work.
This understanding doesn’t just stay theoretical. It becomes part of how we operate every single day.
How I Integrate That Into My Team Daily
I train my team with this model daily in everything we do, and I follow it myself. The more failures we experience together as a team, the quicker we all learn without each person having to make the same mistake individually. Five people failing from the same mistake is more costly than one person failing and informing the other four why it happened and why we shouldn’t repeat it.
This shows up in our daily work through regular check-ins, open retrospectives where we discuss what didn’t work, and creating a culture where asking “What did we learn from this?” is more important than asking “Who messed up?” We share failed experiments in team meetings, document lessons learned, and celebrate the insights that come from things not going according to plan (seriously, celebrating every small victory is a part of our company culture).
The result? A team that’s not afraid to push boundaries, experiment with new approaches, and grow from every experience.
Conclusion
The most significant shift we made in our internship program wasn’t about the projects we assigned or the skills we taught. It was about reframing failure from something to be avoided into something to be embraced.
Traditional internship programs often set interns up to either succeed in predetermined ways or fail quietly in the background. But real learning happens in the messy middle, where curiosity meets uncertainty and mistakes become stepping stones.
By creating safe spaces for our interns to fail fast, fail forward, and fail proudly, we didn’t just help them develop technical skills. We helped them develop the confidence to tackle problems they’d never seen before. That’s the kind of thinking that turns interns into valuable team members and junior designers into problem-solvers.
If you’re considering starting an internship program, ask yourself this: Are you creating an environment where failure is a teacher, or where it’s something to hide? The answer might just determine whether your interns leave with a certificate of completion or with the tools to navigate an entire career.
