Quotes by Henry Petroski

“Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.”

“Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.”

“The paradox is that when we model future designs on past successes, we are inviting failure down the line; when we take into account past failures and anticipate potential new ways in which failure...”

“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 ...”

“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 fa...”

“I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless...”

“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 exempl...”

“Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst.”

“The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists, the vehicle was a tool; to engineers, it was their creation.”

“Science is about knowing engineering is about doing. ”

“I was always told that I was good in mathematics, and I guess my grades and standardized test scores supported that. My worst subjects were those that generally involved a lot of reading - English ...”

“Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Design is nothing if not decision making.”

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

“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 considere...”

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

“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 ...”