Henry Petroski best Failure Quotes – “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.”
Henry Petroski best Failure Quotes – “Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.”
Henry Petroski best Design Quotes – “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 best Design Quotes – “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 best Design Quotes – “Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.”
Henry Petroski best Design Quotes – “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 best Design Quotes – “Any design, whether it’s for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.”
Henry Petroski best Design Quotes – “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 best Design Quotes – “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 best Change Quotes – “As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world – not just study it.”