Henry Petroski Quotes

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

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

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...

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

Science is about knowing engineering is about doing.

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 nu...

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

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

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 wen...

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.

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

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 considered t...

Design is nothing if not decision making.

Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting...

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 giv...

As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world - not just study it.

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...

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.

Too much redesign has to do more with fad and fashion than with fitness and function. It is change for the sake of change. Such redesign is not only unnecessary, it is all too often also retrogressive...