To Engineer Is Human

Petroski, H. (1985). To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. St. Martin's Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1985

Link

https://archive.org/details/toengineerishuma00petr not authoritativematched

Cited from

engineering_design

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Margin of Safety
  • The mechanism works because it is honest about ignorance: the system is not designed to barely survive expected conditions but to survive worse-than-expected ones

    This sourceDevelops the engineering safety factor as the ratio of ultimate to designed load, with explicit discussion of the historical cycle in which margins are raised after failures and lowered when structures appear over-built — the quantified structural-engineering instance of reserve.

• Reserve
  • The pattern recurs unchanged across engineering safety factors (Petroski, 1985), inventory buffers, capital reserves, cardiac reserve and other physiological capacities (Cannon, 1932), seed banks, spinning reserve on power grids, and memory headroom in computing systems, which together establish reserve as one of the most substrate-neutral structural primes in the catalog.

    This sourceDevelops the engineering safety factor as the ratio of ultimate to designed load, with explicit discussion of the historical cycle in which margins are raised after failures and lowered when structures appear over-built — the quantified structural-engineering instance of reserve.

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