American Scientist

The public embarrassment that some well-known British architects and engineers suffered when their highly visible and ambitious Millennium projects did not proceed according to plan was attributable in part to their determination to go well beyond the envelope of experience (Engineering, September–October 2001). But most engineering and design projects present much less grandeur and pretension than lifting the world’s largest Ferris wheel upright in one piece or sculpting a pedestrian bridge with an unprecedentedly low profile. That is not to say that the anonymous architects, engineers and industrial designers who create the everyday objects that we use with little notice are any less confident of their talent or less presumptuous in their goal of producing revolutionary new gadgets or redesigning classic old ones.