To Forgive Design
Henry Petroski · first published 2012 · ISBN 9780674065840
Petroski returns to the question of failure with modern case studies including the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He examines systems of people and machines failing in unforeseen ways. The tone is more ethically engaged than his earlier work, asking what engineers owe the public when their designs break.
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If you want to see how the principles of failure apply to disasters from your own lifetime, this book connects classical engineering catastrophes to contemporary problems. It's also more reflective about responsibility than pure analysis.