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.
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.
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 number.
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.
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.
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 the more important of them.
It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.
No design, no matter how common or seemingly insignificant, is without its adamant critics as well as its ardent admirers.
As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world – not just study it.