Inside Sweden's "Museum of Failure" for failed gadgets and electronics

I feel like every time I get a new box, I feel like it's Christmas, except this stuff I'm unboxing is failure. Hey, I'm Samuel West and I'm curator of the Museum of Failure here in Helsingborg, Sweden. It's a collection of failed innovations that we can learn from. What you're looking at here is a Teleguide, it's sort of like a pre-internet internet. You can use it to find phone numbers, you can even do some simple shopping on it. The Teleguide failed because Swedish Telecom had not negotiated good enough prices. So they actually lost money on each product that was sold. So the Itera Plastic Bicycle from 1982 was then Swedish national innovation failure. It was twice the price of a regular bicycle, it was unstable and it broke. This is the Ford Edsel from 1958. Ford lost billions of dollars on this. To change gears, you push buttons inside the steering wheel same as tooting the horn, it goes into reverse. It was mega hyped up. It even had its own TV show. >> This is the Edsel. >> Ford's problem was that they got their customers to install this fantasy from a psychological perspective. The fiction of the future can be much greater than reality actually is. There was no way that the car could ever meet those expectations. The failure starts early on when you break something as a kid. Nobody goes yay, good for you, you're learning about your environment. So failure is something that gets internalized quite quickly as something negative. We deal with failure and other painful sort of memories by ignoring them, the same way that the companies do. They fail with the product. And instead of learning from their failure, they move on to the next big thing. I could fill an entire museum with smartphones. This is a Microsoft Kin, cheap phone, nobody liked it. The Twitter Peek, completely useless device, people already had smartphones. This is the Iridium Satellite phone, too expensive, cellphones were cheaper and better. The Amazon Fire phone, had a buy button, people hated it. Okay, this right here is a DIVX, it's a disposable DVD. So, disposable in the sense that you bought it, you took it home, and once you started watching you had 48 hours to watch the movie and then you can. This is not a rental, and it's not buy the movie, it's sort of in between. It's nothing. Consumers hated it. It looks horrible. What the hell is this? It's an electric facial mask. It makes you as beautiful as Linda Evans from the TV show, Dynasty. How? By shocking your face. The main message that I wanna convey with the museum is that it's okay to share your inadequacies, your failures, your stupid questions, your unrefined ideas without being negatively judged. I think it's beautiful. It's a nice looking car, I'd buy one >> Except you'd get stuck in traffic changing gears.

Channel: NBC News

Views: 211,609

Keywords: NBC Left Field, Left Field, NBC, NBC News, news, documentary, unboxing, sweden, helsingborg, museum of failure, samuel west, fail, gadgets, tech, museum of failure sweden, museum of failure helsingborg, museum of failure items, museum of failure youtube, all things museum of failure, failed products, failed technology, failed ventures, innovation, biggest flops, innovation biggest flops, teleguide, itera bicycle, plastic bicycle, divx movies, bad design, ford edsel, smartphones

Id: slNKzCovPqg

Length: 3min 47sec (227 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017