Henry Petroski, "Being Human" and "Lessons from Play; Lessons from Life," Selections from To Engineer is Human

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. A recent review declared Petroski "the Stephen Jay Gould of civil engineering" for his ability to make the ideas and concerns of the engineering profession accessible to the lay public. This interest in improving communication between the engineering community and those who live in the world that engineers have helped design is present in all eight books by Petroski. Indeed, Petroski was compelled to write his first book, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1992), because he wanted to answer the questions those outside the engineering profession posed to him whenever a bridge or building collapsed: Why do structures fail, and why can't engineers prevent these catastrophes from happening?

In the selections included here, "Being Human" and "Lessons from Play; Lessons from Life," Petroski explores the role that structural failure inevitably plays in the design process--an exploration that Petroski has pursued throughout his career. Whether writing about a seemingly mundane object like the pencil, as he did in The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1992), or about grander engineering achievements involving concrete and steel, as he did in Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (1996), Petroski's overarching concern is both to demystify and to rehumanize the process of designing, testing, and improving the structures that have made modernity possible. For Petroski, bridges and skyscrapers are such structures, but so too are pencils, books, and educational toys: all have been designed to improve the functioning of civil society and the quality of life of its members. While technological advances will change how engineers go about their work in the future, what won't change, Petroski believes, "is the method that engineering students learn, the method of how to approach problems and how to solve problems." It is through mastering this method, Petroski insists, that engineers--and those who live in the world engineers have designed--realize their human potential.

Petroski, Henry. "Being Human" and "Lessons from Play; Lessons from Life," To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1985.)
Digital image drawn from The American Scientist;
Biographical information from Henry Petroski's home page and the Sloan Career Cornerstone's interview with Petroski.
Quotations from Eric Schatzberg's review of Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing, by Henry Petroski, in Technology and Culture 40.1 (1999) 152-154; and Sloan Career Cornerstone's interview with Petroski.

Links to Explore:

Interview with Henry Petroski: includes a discussion of the importance of pursuing a career in engineering.

"The World Trade Center: Why Did It Collapse?": a discussion by Tim Wilkinson of how the terrorist attack on September 11th led to the structural failure of the Twin Towers. Includes a link to "The Collapse of the World Trade Centre Towers," an article by G. Charles Clifton, which offers a different explanation for the cause of the structural failure. (This is a PDF which takes a while download. You will need to have Acrobat Reader installed on your machine to access this file.)

The Millennium Bridge: home page for the 330m footbridge across the Thames in London that opened on June 10, 2000 to great fanfare as a stunning architectural achievement and was closed three days later because of structural instability.

The Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkways Collapse: the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkways Collapse is presented as an opportunity to debate the ethics of design and professional responsibility (Photos).

Civil Engineers' Code of Ethics: describes the civil engineers' ethical commitments to society and to their profession.

The Speak and Spell: recounts the history of "one of the most successful educational toys of all time."

Questions for Learning:

• In his account of how he came to be an engineer, Petroski discusses how schooling has changed since he was an undergraduate in 1963. What kind of course work are engineers required to take now? What does Petroski mean when he praises engineers for their powers of "communication"? How does expertise in communication differ from expertise in argumentation?
  
  
• The two web sites, "The World Trade Center: Why Did It Collapse?" and "The Collapse of the World Trade Centre Towers," provide competing explanations for the structural failure of the Twin Towers. What purpose do you think such discussions serve? Does it make sense to design buildings to withstand assaults from airplanes? Would Petroski recommend altering the design of skyscrapers in response to this disaster?
  
  
• The Millennium Bridge is, by all accounts, a remarkable engineering achievement, the realization of years of hard work by a team of the world's most accomplished engineers and architects. And yet it failed. What do you make of the design team's reaction to this failure: do their explanations regarding the source of the bridge's sway exemplify Petroski's description of how engineers tackle problems? After visiting the site and reading the discussion of the problem, do you feel that this could have been avoided? Why, at the turn of the century, can't problems of this sort be anticipated in advance and corrected before they arise?
  
  
• Petroski has said that he wrote To Engineer is Human after being asked to explain how it is that disasters like the collapse of the walkway at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency in 1981 could have happened. This disaster has since become a common case to study in ethics courses and engineering courses, where students are encouraged to debate where the responsibility for this tragedy rests. How do you think Petroski would respond to the exercise on The Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkways Collapse? Is he interested in assigning responsibility for this tragedy?
  
  
• Does the Civil Engineers' Code of Ethics allow for the fact that failure is, at least according to Petroski, a central part of the profession's work? What power does this ethical code exert over members of the profession? What, for instance, are we to make of the fact that the engineers who designed the Kansas City Hyatt Regency continue to practice outside the state of Missouri?
  
  
• In his account of how products fail, Petroski writes at length about his son's use of the Speak and Spell. He is exclusively interested in learning from the failure in the product's design. One could argue, though, that the Speak and Spell was a success because of the way it responds to failures in a user's learning. How does the The Speak and Spell's site account for the popularity of this toy? Does the toy itself teach the lesson that Petroski is interested in or does it teach some other lesson about the relationship between play, learning, and failure?

Questions for Connecting:

• "It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art." Does engineering become an art when Veer Bhadra Mishra practices it, as described in Alexander Stille's essay, "The Ganges' Next Life"? Is it an art when William Oswald practices it? If engineering is not exclusively a scientific venture, then what would qualify as one, under Petroski's definition?

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