The World Motivation
Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.
“Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.”
— Henry Petroski · Design
Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.
Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.
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.
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.
The artist in me cries out for design.
Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.
Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.
We're huge, huge fans of the 'Dark Souls' games, and there's something about when you're playing 'Dark Souls.' Immediately when you're in that world, it was to do with the imagery, it has to do with the sound design, and you're just immediately very uncomfortable and on edge. We wanted you to feel that way when you're in the Upside Down.
There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.