The Back Swan: on Robustness and Fragility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese philosophical essayist, scholar and practitioner of mathematical financial economics. He is best known as the author of the 2007 book (completed 2010) The Black Swan. Taleb has been critical of the finance industry and has been credited with making warnings regarding financial crises and making a fortune out of the 2008 crisis. Taleb is an activist and a promoter of what he calls a "Black Swan robust" society as well as aggressive "stochastic tinkering" as a means of scientific discovery.

Three years after the pubication of The Black Swan, Nassin Nicholas Taleb write the new book, where he studies the 2008 crisis, and about the economists should analize and take care of it, with annotations that have the taste of the irony and the skepticism.

Robustness and fragility summerize three years old life of a strong idea, that it’s able to change and modify our mental paradigms. From these meetings it was born "Robustness and Fragility", his new philosophical story where, furnishing us a topographical paper of the Estremistan, Taleb it teaches us whether to move us in a world dominated by the case and by the uncertainty.

Robust Design Philosophy

Robust Design is a proven development philosophy focused on achieving target reliability. Approaching this aggressive goal requires that Robust Design principles be an early and integral part of the development cycle. The objective is to make the end-product immune to factors that could adversely affect performance. Robust Design requires that the following four factors be considered in the design process: signal, response, noise, and control. 

Source: http://synopsys.com/Systems/Saber/Pages/RobustDesign.aspx

The robust design theory is applied to make products more "resistant" of external factors that affected it. We wanted to include it in put blog because it can be considered as a "philosophy" of design.