To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Henry Petroski de verdad tiene algo que decir, y se toma su tiempo en explicarlo, a pesar de que el libro ya tiene sus buenos años, y esta revisión sólo nos acerca a 1991 , su contenido no ha perdido vigencia.

La ingeniería en casi todos sus ejemplos es civil o aeronáutica (comenzando con Dédalo e Ícaro) , aunque también toca a los diseñadores industriales y los juguetes, y no usa los errores para auparse el mismo, señala que el fracaso, las fallas, también ayudan, y es más, son las responsables de que la ingeniería avance, pues apostar a lo seguro (igual que en la literatura) sólo provoca un estancamiento y no deja que la humanidad avance.

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"...thus the shape of all designed things is the product of arbitrary choice. if you vary the terms of your compromise - say, more speed, more heat, less safety, more discomfort, lower first cost - then you vary the shape of the thing designed. it is quite impossible for any design to be "the logical outcome of the requirements" simply because, the requirements being in conflict, their logical outcome is an impossibility"


The successful transportation to the moon and back has demonstrated that lack of experience alone does not necessarily condemn a design to failure


"A profession that never has accidents is unlikely to be serving its country efficiently "

What happens, of course is that success ultimately leads to failure; aesthetic failure, functional failure and structural failure.
The first can take away the zest for life, the second the quality of life, and the third life itself. Structural failure usually reverses the trend toward less and less safe structures of the kind that failed, however , either trough the abandonment of that line of structures or trough being strengthened or used more conservatively.There is always pressure for relevant building codes, factors of safety, and engineering practice to be made more conservative after a failure, and in this way failures lead to new succeses. The process would appear to be cyclic.

Ingeniería: arte, ciencia...y mucha ingratitud pic.twitter.com/QhcWaozJRT

— Esimio Incomprendido (@JIFF01) January 27, 2014