Reading about Margaret Hamilton alongside Don Norman’s ideas made me reflect a lot on my own experiences as an IM major and CS minor. Hamilton’s work is astounding, not just in its technical brilliance, but in the stakes involved. I can’t imagine the pressure of knowing that a single error in your code could be catastrophic. That hit home for me when I thought back to my summer internship: I often felt anxious during functional testing, making sure that a feature actually worked before even thinking about optimizing it. Like Hamilton, I had to prioritize reliability over aesthetics at first, knowing that structure and efficiency could come later. Similarly, when working with Professor Moore on designing a robot extension, our creative vision for the robot was limited by its movements and what was functional, which was frustrating but also helped me come to the realization that function always had to come first.
Norman’s ideas about aesthetics and human experience made me notice the other side of this balance. I’ve realized that I learn better and retain information more effectively when it’s presented aesthetically, which is why I rewrite notes or design presentations carefully. I genuinely think it affects focus and engagement. Reflecting on Hamilton through Norman’s lens, I see that even in high-stakes work, there can be an “internal aesthetics” for the creator, like the satisfaction of elegantly structured, reliable code. This reading also made me think about how much balance is a part of my own work. I often want to implement my vision exactly, but my capabilities, time, and technical constraints sometimes get in the way. It can be frustrating, but I see now that navigating this tension, between function, reliability, and human experience, is a universal part of creating, whether you’re sending astronauts to the Moon or designing a robot extension. Hamilton’s example pushes me to aim for excellence under pressure, while Norman reminds me that design is also about how people, whether users or creators, experience the work.
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