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Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering?
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Look for Design Paradigms by Henry Petroski. It is a fascinating and detailed look at engineering failures (using mainly bridges to establish the narrative).
Right. My point in bringing up bambi meets godzilla was to note that what distinguishes the original and a remake is merely their place in time. I shouldn't have clouded the issue with mentioning improving or changing certain elements.
You mentioned in the discussion on art that paintings and sculptures don't have rules in the same way that writing does (or carpentry). I submit that most of those rules are merely conventions. Even the rules of architecture change over time. Henry Petroski's book Design Paradigms is ostensibly a set of case studies in structural engineering failure. However as he follows bridge construction during the 19th century you can watch rules about soundness and good design change over time as materials are tested or new methods devised. Deep down, building bridges is a matter of physics--the least socially constructed foundation I can imagine. And yet the paradigms change. What makes a quality bridge one year may make for a poor bridge the next. And it isn't a monotone climb to the top. New methods change tolerance computation and loading decisions and bridge failures (hopefully in the prototyping stages) inform those changes. We can imagine perhaps that deep down when we have it all figured out we will settle on the way to make a "good" bridge and recognize past attempts as approximations, but we can never actually know when we have reached that point. Moreover determinations of "quality" (that is, soundness and integrity) were greatly socially informed. As certain bridge designers became prominent in certain countries (England especially) specific designs were treated as more or less safe based on their previous use. From a distance it looked a great deal like a fad. We can argue that these are stylistic choices but the discourse between designers and planners was very much driven by engineering language.
If the rules on bridge building are not fixed, how can we imagine that the rules for prose/scripts are fixed as well?
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