WORK
To Engineer Is Human
Petroski's 1985 foundational text establishing that catastrophic failures are the primary teachers of the engineering profession — the book that launched his career as the leading popular interpreter of engineering failure and articulated the principles subsequent work would extend.
To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, published in 1985, was Petroski's first widely read book and established the conceptual framework that would organize his subsequent career. The book's central argument is that engineering progress is driven not by the accumulation of successes but by the careful study of failures. Each catastrophic collapse — the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Hyatt Regency walkways, the DC-10 cargo door failures — deposits knowledge in the profession that no sequence of successful designs could produce. The book introduced the
framing of
design as hypothesis, the concept of
the factor of safety as epistemological commitment, and the warning that computer-aided design could erode the judgment it was supposed to support. Its title phrase —
to engineer is human — captured the book's moral argument: engineering is a human activity because its consequences are human, and the machines that assist engineers do not change