Best quotes by Henry Petroski on Design

Checkout quotes by Henry Petroski on Design

• ‟ 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.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ Everything we do is designed, whether we're producing a magazine, a website, or a bridge. Design is really the creative invention that designs everything.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth - it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ You can almost say that a design error is a human error because, after all, it's we humans who do the designing.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ No design, no matter how common or seemingly insignificant, is without its adamant critics as well as its ardent admirers.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ Design is nothing if not decision making.

  - Henry Petroski
  

• ‟ It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.

  - Henry Petroski