HER CODE GOT HUMANS ON THE MOON—AND INVENTED SOFTWARE ITSELF
For a woman who created influential change in a STEM field during the 1960s, Hamilton is surely an outlier as well as a role model to women and girls who wish to follow similar paths. What blew my mind during the Apollo mission procedure was the meticulous behavior of Hamilton. While others hastily moved on with the main project, Hamilton went step-by-step and made sure everything was in order, including the P01 note. Moreover, having extra responsibilities while being a mother meant work would be more tedious towards someone like Hamilton, but because she enjoyed what she did she was able to endure the hardships that came along with it.
Ultimately, Hamilton’s example is great since it paves a new way of thinking about women in STEM fields. And because of great women like Hamilton, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, etc. we now live in a society where women are encouraged to follow their dreams of being a scientist or an engineer and are given the environment to do so. Let us hope that in the future theses environments can be created for girls in third world countries as well.
- Chapter 1 of Norman “Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better”
I do agree that aesthetics can correlate to better results, yet I also want to add on to the emotion part, while providing my own argument. When we look at a device that is aesthetically pleasing, we are suddenly filled with a positive emotion since “something” had exceeded our expectations. Because the object has given us happiness, we reciprocate and think highly of our counterpart. This, however, can also be dangerous since it may cause us to overrate the object, thus giving it a better judgement than its actual perceived functionality. Even though the positive feeling may “arouse curiosity, engages creativity, and makes the brain into an effective learning organism”, I believe that even in real life situation we trust ourselves too much that we think better of what something actually is. For instance, if I go to a sushi restaurant that has normal sushi but has the highest quality of service, I would probably still say it is a great restaurant. This packages my statement but the people who listens to my rumors may also believe that the food is good as well. If you are interested in more of these examples, people from VICE have been making fake restaurants and models to reach the highest points just by spreading “positive” rumors. When we hear something positive, I believe that at the end of the day we need to question ourselves once more if we are judging a certain object by its functionality or its objective features rather than our subjective emotions.