Petroski Henry. To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

NY: Vintage, 1992. — 269 p. — ISBN: 9780679734161.The moral of this book is that behind every great engineering success is a trail of often ignored (but frequently spectacular) engineering failures. Petroski covers many of the best known examples of well-intentioned but ultimately failed design in action -- the galloping Tacoma Narrows Bridge (which you've probably seen tossing cars willy-nilly in the famous black-and-white footage), the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways -- and many lesser known but equally informative examples. The line of reasoning Petroski develops in this book were later formalized into his quasi-Darwinian model of technological evolution in The Evolution of Useful Things, but this book is arguably the more illuminating - and defintely the more enjoyable - of these two titles.Preface
Being human
Falling down is part of growing up
Lessons from play; lessons from life
Appendix : «The deacon’s masterpiece», by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Engineering as hypothesis
Success is foreseeing failure
Design is getting from here to there
Design as revision
Accidents waiting to happen
Safety in numbers
When cracks become breakthroughs of bus frames and knife blades
Interlude: the success story of the crystal palace
The ups and downs of bridges
Forensic engineering and engineering fiction
From slide rule to computer: forgetting how it used to be done
Connoisseurs of chaos
The limits of design
Afterword
Bibliography
Index