There seems to be an intuitive tendency to deplore wastage of resources, although the personal threshold for an acceptable level of wastage depends variously upon ethnic, economic, and geographic origins. Overconsumption seems somehow repugnant; and a visceral abhorence surges in one's guts when faced with its evidences: fat, litter, corrosion, indulgences, gaudiness, etc. Despite the difficulties we often have with our own self control, we nonetheless seem impelled to curb as best we can our own wasteful habits. This gut rejection of wastage seems somehow fundamental to the human system.
This distaste for wastage is no doubt prompted by the comparison with the optimizing processes in the body itself where everything is in balance and where overindulgence desecrates and eventually destroys the harmonious human system.
So the psychologically derived mandate within engineers to build optimal structures, which perform efficiently and gracefully as well as with a minimum of wastage, produces...
