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.
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