"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 PetroskiTiny Panda Quotes
Quotes by Henry Petroski
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"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"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"Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection."
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"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"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"Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure."
Henry Petroski"Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst."
Henry Petroski"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, leading to things that work less effectively than those they were designed to replace."
Henry Petroski"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."
Henry Petroski"Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing."
Henry Petroski