"Codes, in the business of designing the new, often have to be given a fresh reading and a new interpretation. A code is a historical statement based on experience and testing, but mostly on experience. Design is design of the new and untried, the unexperienced, the ahistorical. As such, the code can never assure the successful and safe performance of the artifact or system in all its ways" (p. 135)
"Designing is not simply a matter of trade-offs, of instrumental, rational weighing of interests against each other, a process of measuring alternatives and options against some given performance conditions. Nothing is sacred, not even performance specifications, for these, too, are negotiated, changed, or even thrown out altogether, while those that matter are embellished and made rigid with time as design proceeds. They themselves are the artifacts of design." (p. 187)
From Louis Bucciarelli's Designing Engineers, (c) 1994 MIT Press.
