Tom Fisher: Designing Systems to Avoid Failure
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 Thomas Fisher calls fracture-critical design.
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ABOUT Thomas Fisher
“Thomas Fisher is a Professor and Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Educated at Cornell University in architecture and Case Western Reserve University in intellectual history.
He has been a leader in the public-interest design movement, and a long-time researcher and advocate for using design to tackle the major economic, environmental, and societal challenges facing the world.
Recognised as one of the most published academics in his field, Prof. Fisher is the author of six books. In his new book, ‘Designing to Avoid Disaster: The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design’ he 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.
Prof. Fisher 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.
He believes we designed our way to such disasters and we can design our way out of them, with a number of possible solutions that he provides. His current work revolves around how design can solve problems in areas ranging from Public Health and Childhood Obesity, to Sustainability, Education and Government.”
The VIDEO
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