What brought down two brand new Boeing 737's in the span of two months? Was the Challenger spacecraft disaster preventable? Why did Hurricane Katrina have such devastating results for New Orleans? What went wrong during the design phase of the Hyatt Regency skywalks that caused their collapse within months of their opening? What have we learned from past disasters? What are the ethical implications for engineers and managers alike? To answer the question "Why do things fail?" we must look beyond the specific conditions that cause a single point or a single component to fail. In this course, we will, of course, study how individual components fail, but a much greater emphasis will be placed on the myriad of other reasons why things fail. We will learn how to design structures with specific performance goals in mind, we will predict their failure points, then we will build them, test them, and compare our results with our predictions.