Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design
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"Success through Failure is an insightful and accessible foray into design. The book is a page-turner, with an intensity that builds as you read. I found myself waiting for discussions of various topics--from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to the space shuttle--only to find them before me several pages later. A must-read for any design engineer, or anyone who wants to understand how great designs evolve."--Jonathan Cagan, coauthor of The Design of Things to Come and Creating Breakthrough Products"This most readable book presents design from an engineer's point of view; its author is one of the masters of this approach. It will enrich engineers' understanding of their profession's heritage and tools, and help nonengineers see everything from slide shows to skyscrapers in new ways."--Edward Tenner, author of Our Own Devices and Why Things Bite Back Publishers Weekly From the clumsy packaging of Aleve pain reliever to the space shuttle Columbia disaster, this engrossing study mourns and celebrates failed designs that spur further improvement. Civil engineer Petroski, author of The Evolution of Useful Things and other meditations on manufactured objects, reminds us that setbacks teach us more than triumphs. The principle is easy to see in gargantuan construction projects; the art of bridge building, he notes, advances over the rubble of collapsed spans. But the essence of engineering, he contends, is to construe every limiting aspect of existence as a remediable malfunction; even the elemental wooden pointer is an underperforming contraption with a bug-finite length-corrected in the next generation of laser pointers. The moral Petroski draws-success breeds hubris and catastrophe, failure nurtures humility and insight-is worth pondering, but his conceit mainly furnishes a peg for his trademark historical sketches of the world of objects, full of evocative observations of, say, those interludes during the glitch-prone dawn of PowerPoint presentations when "everyone just stood around or sat by and watched in silence as the bashful new technology was coaxed out of its black box." He delivers a lesson in the price of progress and another perceptive look at the relationship between man and his stuff. Photos. B&w illus. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
PrefaceIntroduction 11 From Plato's Cave to PowerPoint 102 Success and Failure in Design 443 Intangible Things 814 Things Small and Large 975 Building on Success 1166 Stepping-Stones to Super-Spans 1397 The Historical Future 163Notes 195Index 219
