Design and Usability
The main Idea of the reading was, a positive effect can make people worry less about minor discerpencies and make them think out of the box which is called “breadth-first” thinking. On the other hand, a negative effect results in “depth-first'” thinking which in essentialya a more narrow and conecentrated approach. The author elaborated this point, by examples of his teapot set and stress situations. A good asthetic might become an obstacle when the task at hand needs to be done in a hurry. I was thinking about can there be a case where both, usabiltiy and design, can be a problem. The first thought was gift packaging. In situation where some one gives you a present in rather fancy packaging at your birthday, a bunch of people are sitting there waiting for you to open to see what is inside. But that ancy athetic box doesn’t seem to have an opening. its top and bottom are both the same. This leads me to think that why it is preassummed in the reading that the more we lean to the asthetic side, we are losing usabitly. A good example to my argument is fancy coffee machine. it has only two user interactions i.e. putting the cup and pressing the dessired button. Now no matter how glamorous the coffee making is happening (imagine there are long glass canals all over the place which alll fall in to you cup.) if the the two user interactions are easy to access, then we have both a good design and usbailty.
Hamilton
The article demonsatrated her foundational role in the Apollo 11 mission. She introduced the idea of Software Engineering. I was surprised by the fact that at that time they didn’t that software engineering as a key factor as there was no budget for it. Her failsafe mechanisms and asynchrousus modelling proved to be a saviour during the mission. it also reflected a gender bias. Despite her work, not a lot of acknowledgement was given.
The key take away from it was how people interact with systems and how the system should be ready of exceptional circumstances within the given resources. Most of the time when I have written some for a program and I let a friend use it, they come up with use cases I have never thought before. A system can crash, they do normally but there should be a way to recover from it. This reading gave an insight about how anticipation of faliure is just half of the work.