Principles of Design #5 – Redundancy
Redundancy is the use of more elements than necessary, to ensure the maintenance of the system in the event of failure of one or more elements. Failure is inevitable in any system, but that does not make it inevitable that the whole system will fail to achieve it’s goals: be they to communicate a message, maintain traffic flow or conduct research. Designers use redundancy to prevent system failures, with at least four types of redundancy being used: diverse, homogeneous, active and passive. Read more »
