Designing to avoid disaster : the nature of fracture-critical design / Thomas Fisher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fisher, Thomas, 1953- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Design--Methodology.

Safety factor in engineering.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (273 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"Recent catastrophic events, such as the I-35W bridge collapse, New Orleans flooding, the BP oil spill, Port au Prince's destruction by earthquake, Fukushima nuclear plant's devastation by tsunami, the Wall Street investment bank failures, and the housing foreclosure epidemic and the collapse of housing prices, all stem from what author Thomas Fisher calls fracture-critical design. This is design in which structures and systems have so little redundancy and so much interconnectedness and misguided efficiency that they fail completely if any one part does not perform as intended. If we, as architects, planners, engineers, and citizens are to predict and prepare for the next disaster, we need to recognize this error in our thinking and to understand how design thinking provides us with a way to anticipate unintended failures and increase the resiliency of the world in which we live. In Designing to Avoid Disaster, the author discusses the context and cultural assumptions that have led to a number of disasters worldwide, describing the nature of fracture-critical design and why it has become so prevalent. He traces the impact of fracture-critical thinking on everything from our economy and politics to our educational and infrastructure systems to the communities, buildings, and products we inhabit and use everyday. And he shows how the natural environment and human population itself have both begun to move on a path toward a fracture-critical collapse that we need to do everything possible to avoid. We designed our way to such disasters and we can design our way out of them, with a number of possible solutions that Fisher provides"--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

pt. 1. The nature of fracture-critical design

pt. 2. How fracture-critical design affects our lives

pt. 3. Designing to avoid future disasters.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-246) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on March 06, 2020)

ISBN:

9781136286131

1136286136

9781283862066

1283862069

9781136286148

1136286144

9780203113295

0203113292

OCLC:

820787720