To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
Why I recommend it
Petroski shows how engineering failures expose assumptions and help improve design. He takes the reasoning before a failure seriously.
What it changed in my thinking
A design can work for a long time without revealing its limits. Studying what broke can teach us what success hid.
Who it’s useful for
Engineers, designers, and teams learning from incidents.
A tension or limitation
Learning from failure doesn’t excuse preventable harm. The people who pay for a failure aren’t always the people who learn from it.