To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design Book

Here, "engineering" primarily means big structures that can carry people: bridges, building, airplanes. Of course, in the real world, there are many other categories of engineering.

Message of the book can be summarized in a few lines: Engineering is a trade-off between meeting requirements safely, and cost (design cost, materials cost, labor cost), and aesthetics (dramatic bridges, buildings, ...). Primarly, it goes into depth about how a structure doesn't just "follow from requirements"; there are countless judgements made by the designer on cost and aesthetic grounds. Further, one cannot fully test for all the conditions that the structure will undergo, and hence there will always be failures. Further, failures teach us a lot about how do it the next time.

For someone who understands the above thesis, the book is kind of boring and repetitive. It's probably a good book for someone who is not aware of engineering tradeoffs.

One of the last few chapters is about the negative effects of moving from slide rules to electronic calculators and computers. First, engineers have lost the intuitive feel of numbers, i.e., in slide rule days, a bad number (perhaps due to a bad calculation) would smell funny, because the slide rule teaches you to understand expected orders of magnitude (where is the decimal point) and number of significant digits; with electronic calculation, people just take the number at face value. Second, before computers the sheer labor of calculation was so much that people stuck to a few tried and tested
designs and typically "overdesigned" everything. With computers, people try funky designs, and try to optimize the last extra pound and dollar out of the design, making them much riskier. I'm ok with this
thesis, but he does not mention the benefits of the computer, namely that certain calculation mistakes don't occur any more, and the computer can "test" the structure in a lot more scenarios than was feasible earlier. I think he goes overboard on the negatives and gives too short shrift to the positives.