Annual Celebration of Excellence by Students (ACES)

Guest Speaker

ACES 2008
Keynote Talk
11:30 - 12:30,
Room 100
Nedderman Hall

Image of Dr. Henry Petroski

SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE
The Paradox of Design

Engineering is about making and doing things that have not been done before. To be successful, it is essential that engineers properly anticipate how things can fail, and design accordingly. Case studies of past failures thus provide invaluable information for the design of future successes. Conversely, designs based on the extrapolation of successful experience alone can eventually lead to failure. These ideas will be explored in the context of the history of the design of suspension bridges, which from the 1850s through the 1930s evolved from John Roebling's enormous successes to bridges that oscillated in the wind and, in the case of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, twisted apart and collapsed in 1940. Lessons learned from the case of suspension bridges apply across a broad spectrum of engineering structures and systems. The talk will be accompanied by projected images of the bridges discussed.

ACES 2008
Guest Speaker
Biography

Henry Petroski, Ph.D.
Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Duke University

BME Manhattan College, 1963

MS Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1964

Ph.D. Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1968

Henry Petroski received his bachelor's degree from Manhattan College in 1963 and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1968. Before coming to Duke in 1980, he had taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Texas at Austin and was a group leader at Argonne National Laboratory, where he was responsible for research and development efforts in fracture mechanics. He is a professional engineer registered in Texas, and a chartered engineer registered in Ireland.

Professor Petroski's current research activity focuses on the areas of failure analysis and design theory. Ongoing projects include the use of case histories to understand the role of human error and failure in engineering design as well as the development of models for invention and evolution in the engineering design process. His research has been sponsored by the Corps of Engineers, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other organizations, and he has published over seventy refereed journal articles in such places as International Journal of Fracture, Engineering Fracture Mechanics, Journal of Applied Mechanics, Structural Safety, and Research in Engineering Design.

Professor Petroski is author of the book, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985), and is the writer and presenter of the 1987 BBC-television documentary, "To Engineer Is Human," which has been broadcast on PBS. He is also the author of The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990), The Evolution of Useful Things (1992), Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering (1994), Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and The Spanning of America (1995), Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing (1996), and Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering (1997). The Book on the Bookshelf (1999), Paperboy: Confessions of a Future engineer (2002), Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (2003), and Pushing the Limits: More Adventures in Engineering (forthcoming in 2004), and he writes the engineering column for American Scientist and a bimonthly column on the professor for ASEE Prism. He also lectures widely and is interviewed frequently on radio and television.

Among his honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990-1991), honorary degree from Clarkson University (1990), Trinity College (1997), Valparaiso University (1999) and Manhattan College (2003), the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1991), and the Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (1993). He is the recipient of a Centennial Award as an Outstanding Engineering Graduate of Manhattan College (1992) and an Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from the College of Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1994). Professor Petroski is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.