Henry Petroski at Design Matters

March 12th, 2008 by k8gu Leave a reply »

Noted engineer and failure analyst Henry Petroski spoke recently as a part of the Design Matters series of lectures at UIUC.   He has distilled millenia of human innovation into the following short sentences:

Perfection does not exist.
Form follows failure.
Criticism leads invention.
Design begets design.
Good betters best.
Problems persist.
Invention thrives.
Technology evolves.

I’m not sure there’s much I can possibly add to that…

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