Today, I am celebrating the receipt of a new book. I just got my copy of Henry Petroski’s new book, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure. I’ve already consumed (“read” is far too passive) a couple of chapters with my usual pleasure for his works.
I suspect many (most?) law professors are not aware of Petroski’s work as he is a professor of civil engineering at Duke and writes about industrial design, not law. As with his other works (and the works of another non-lawyer I always read, Douglas Hofstadter), Petroski always brings a broader perspective to my work. I’m beginning to suspect that those of us who teach law would learn significant lessons from our engineering colleagues.
The triggering event for this post was combining Petroski’s discussion of designing products for failure (“The term ‘managed failure’ has been used to describe situations where a certain kind of failure mode is designed into an otherwise robust system so that it is ‘capable of successful misuse.’” Id. at 49–50) with our latest effort of strategic planning at U.Mass. Do we in the legal academy plan for failure? I fear not. Promising students (and none of us would admit any other kind to our program) don’t achieve the institution's expectations. The new faculty members who seemed so dynamic a few years ago when they were hired couldn’t translate their creative spark into teaching or scholarship. The Assistant Vice Dean for Institutional Improvement proved, not surprisingly, to achieve a purpose 180 degrees away from the job title.
The most typical institutional response to all of these failures is to move the person out. The student will be placed on probation and then dismissed. The faculty member will not be promoted or will be denied tenure. With luck, the Dean of the Law School will convince someone in the university’s central administration to promote the Assistant Vice Dean out of the law school. In each case, the failure of the institution to positively affect the individual remains.
I suspect many (most?) law professors are not aware of Petroski’s work as he is a professor of civil engineering at Duke and writes about industrial design, not law. As with his other works (and the works of another non-lawyer I always read, Douglas Hofstadter), Petroski always brings a broader perspective to my work. I’m beginning to suspect that those of us who teach law would learn significant lessons from our engineering colleagues.
The triggering event for this post was combining Petroski’s discussion of designing products for failure (“The term ‘managed failure’ has been used to describe situations where a certain kind of failure mode is designed into an otherwise robust system so that it is ‘capable of successful misuse.’” Id. at 49–50) with our latest effort of strategic planning at U.Mass. Do we in the legal academy plan for failure? I fear not. Promising students (and none of us would admit any other kind to our program) don’t achieve the institution's expectations. The new faculty members who seemed so dynamic a few years ago when they were hired couldn’t translate their creative spark into teaching or scholarship. The Assistant Vice Dean for Institutional Improvement proved, not surprisingly, to achieve a purpose 180 degrees away from the job title.
The most typical institutional response to all of these failures is to move the person out. The student will be placed on probation and then dismissed. The faculty member will not be promoted or will be denied tenure. With luck, the Dean of the Law School will convince someone in the university’s central administration to promote the Assistant Vice Dean out of the law school. In each case, the failure of the institution to positively affect the individual remains.
Henry Petroski (February 6, 1942) is an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he is also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books – beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985) and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, and silverware. He is a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist and Prism. His most recently published book is To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure.
Posted by: Patent Infringement | September 07, 2012 at 12:35 AM
I had the pleasure of having Prof. Petroski teach one of my first year engineering classes at Duke. His knack for considering other perspectives in his work was what led me to leave the engineering school for the liberal arts and, eventually, law school. I still remember our (midterm?) assignment to design a better paper clip and justify it in a paper. Happy to see him recognized on this blog!
Posted by: Heidi R. Anderson | September 07, 2012 at 12:41 PM