Disaster and success: design lessons from history

This paper discusses the pedagogical advantages of the structured inclusion of engineering history in undergraduate engineering programmes. The author argues that studying multiple case histories involving failure allows students to progress from learning particular lessons from individual disasters to identifying features common to many failures. Architectural students take modules on the history of architecture and construction as part of the development of their creative skills. This paper promotes the use of a range of historic engineering examples of successful design to encourage engineering students to recognise creativity as a key feature of good engineering design. It uses a wide range of historic engineering failures and successful engineering designs to show how such examples can be used in a structured way to promote responsible and creative design. The examples of failure range from the Tay Bridge disaster to the brittle fracture of the Liberty ships: examples of success range from Brunelleschi's scheme to construct the Dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore to Peter Rice of Arup's development of spherical shell elements to realise Utzon's concept for the roof of Sydney's opera house.