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

•   Peter Drucker, "The Age of Social Transformation" and Michael Pollan, "Playing God in the Garden"

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, please visit the Petroski link-o-mat.

Petroski, Drucker, and Pollan: Failure and the Making of Society

In many ways, "Why do things fall apart?" is the central question of "Selections from To Engineer Is Human." As Henry Petroski pursues an answer to this question, he presents a number of concepts-such as fatigue, engineering lifetimes, and failure-that tell us something about the process of creation, or, more generally, the process of making. At the same time, as the title of Pollan's book suggests, these are not answers for engineering only. If, indeed, to engineer is human, then these concepts may have larger implications. Both Peter Drucker and Michael Pollan are concerned with making as well: making new potatoes, making a decision about whether or not to eat them, making a new society or making new means to solve that society's problems.

Write an essay, then, in which you take a position on the costs or benefits of failure and its relation to the processes of making, growth, and/or the evolution of cultures, products, or ideas.

One quick tip: a strong project here would not simply say "failure is good" or "failure is bad." Think of Petroski's own essay in this respect: failure is a complicated process with risks, costs, and benefits. Your job in this paper is to stake out a similarly nuanced and complicated position and then to support that position with Petroski and one of the other essays.

Roughs should be 4pp. Finals should be 5-6pp. Turn in all peer commented drafts with the final.

Barclay Barrios, Fall '01