Henry Petroski
Henry Petroski
Henry Petroskiis an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he is also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books – beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Designand including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, and silverware. He is a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 February 1942
CountryUnited States of America
Many of the familiar little things that we use every day have typically evolved over a period of time to a state of familiarity. They balance form and function, elegance and economy, success and failure in ways that are not only acceptable, but also admirable.
Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.
You can almost say that a design error is a human error because, after all, it's we humans who do the designing.
It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.
Betting on the success of innovative technologies in the marketplace can carry all the uncertainty and risk that betting on the next card in the deck does at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. There is a factor of randomness that must be factored in, but precisely how to do so is anyone's guess.
It has been said, by engineers themselves, that given enough money, they can accomplish virtually anything: send men to the moon, dig a tunnel under the English Channel. There's no reason they couldn't likewise devise ways to protect infrastructure from the worst hurricanes, earthquakes and other calamities, natural and manmade.
The same aspirations to celebrate and uplift the spirit that drove the Egyptians to build the pyramids are still driving us. The things we're doing differ only in magnitude.
We can't simply blame the engineers when things go wrong because, no matter how well they plan, things don't always go according to plan.
Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.
Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.
As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world - not just study it.
An over-reliance on past successes is a sure blueprint for future failures.
Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing.
I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.