Although Donald Norman’s ideas about emotion design and the role of aesthetics in design and Margaret Hamilton’s invention of the modern concept of software may seem unrelated at first glance, I found quite some connecting ideas between these readings, especially in the concepts of user-centered design, and its application in stressful situations.
Donald Norman and Margaret Hamilton both stressed the significance of developing products and software with the end user in mind. Norman’s work on emotional design emphasizes the importance of developing products that elicit good emotional reactions from users. Similarly, Hamilton’s work in software engineering was centered on making software more user-friendly and stable, as well as ensuring that it fits the demands of its users. Although Hamilton was a programmer and her job circled around functionality rather than anything else, she knew that failure might occur not because of mistakes in the system, but because of human mistakes when interacting with it. The story of the prelaunch program called P01 stuck in my mind, when an astronaut accidentally launched it at a wrong time and that almost cost the whole mission. Hamilton was aware that users are not perfect even in using systems that they were well trained on using, and even if they are astronauts themselves: “We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes,” she says. “They were trained to be perfect.” For me, this story defines what is user-centered design: it is the assumption that users are not perfect and the stress on importance of considering the human element in design and engineering, ultimately leading to more effective and user-friendly products and software.
This has been further backed up by Norman in his discussion on designs for low and high stress environments. I think it is not highly disputable that something like an Apollo mission is quite a stressful situation, which, according to Norman, makes good human-centered design “especially important”. Stressful environments and circumstances increase the chances of human error, and Hamilton was right in her idea to take that into account and to prevent as many misuses due to human error as possible in her design of Apollo software.