My googling didn't show any.
I am imagining a Web Site of Unproduced Designs, cross indexed by product type, decade, and designer name. Pictures and text.
So many products and buildings have been designed and then not produced or built.
We get scattered glimpses of this sort of thing in books about designers and architects, but I have always thought a web site dedicated to this sort of thing could be an inspiring and useful resource.
I suspect a significant part of what is designed and architected is never realized. So many car designs are experimented with and never realized. One in a hundred thousand film scripts are shot. I get the feeling reading the designers who contribute here that significant amounts of what they work on does not reach production.
It seems to me that, while unproduced designs probably often have shortcomings that justified their rejection, many are rejected for reasons beyond whether these were good designs, or not. Many are victims of changing demographics, changing retail outlets, economic hard times, and occassionally designers who just run out of gas pushing their ideas.
Every poet, artist, architect, and designer I have ever spoken with has indicated they have either been inspired by, or emulated (often inverted) some idea, technical aspect, or miscellaneous this or that from another person's work.
It seems an internet web site is well-suited to amplify this cross pollinization of ideas, especially from the past. But just as importantly, it also seems that it might give designers of these unproduced products/buildings a show case for their work that might attract producers down the road to initiate contact with these designers.
All of these unproduced designs seem to constitute an enormous seed stock fallen into oblivion. Might it not make sense for these designs to fall somewhere where the chances of their re-consideration by other producers and cross-pollinization potential for other designers might be amplified?
Would many living designers contribute to such a site? Would many estates of well-known deceased designers contribute?
Or would my idea be viewed as giving away hard work, and betraying confidentiality agreements on work done, etc. and so hopelessly constrained?
On a related argument...
....that one learns more from mistakes than from successes, I challenged a number of colleagues during a design gathering at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) to offer the university a presentation of one of their major mistakes. Everybody agreed at first but on the planned day I was the only one to show up. But I agree, with the amount of rejected projects in architecture and design one should have at least the benefit of learning from it.
On a sillier note
There is a venerable institution here in Massachusetts that honors failings: MoBA: The Museum of Bad Art. Housed in the basement of two movie theaters (on your way to the bathrooms) MoBA shows a rotating collection of truly wretched art. Much of it is by inexperienced hacks, but a growing number of legitimate artists are submitting their own dreadful failures. While silly in concept the Museum has published two volumes of masterworks, and expanded in the past year to show more of its collection.
http://www.museumofbadart.org/index.html
If you need any help, please contact us at – info@designaddict.com