Petroski's Maxims of Engineering Failure
Today's New York Times (free subscription required)profiles Henry Petroski, a Duke Professor whose research focuses on the lessons to be learned from design and construction failures.
According to the article, his lessons include:
¶Success masks failure. The more a thing operates successfully, the more confidence we have in it. So we dismiss little failures — like the repeated loss of a space shuttle's insulating tiles launchings — as trivial annoyances rather than preludes to catastrophe.
¶Systems that require error-free performance are doomed to failure.
¶Computer simulations and other methods of predicting whether components will fail are themselves vulnerable to failure.
¶Devices can be made foolproof, but not damn-fool-proof....
¶Today's successful design is tomorrow's failure, in that expectations for technology are continually on the rise.
¶A device designed for one purpose may fail when put to another use.