The Margaret Hamilton reading honestly made me think about how often people say “that would never happen” just because it’s easier than actually dealing with the possibility that it might. Like the people around her weren’t necessarily careless, but they were comfortable, and that comfort made them dismiss things that didn’t fit their expectations. What I liked about Hamilton is that she didn’t rely on that kind of thinking at all, she kept imagining worst-case scenarios even when no one else wanted to. When she talks about picturing “headlines in the newspapers… and it would point back to me,” it didn’t feel dramatic, it just felt like she understood responsibility in a very real way. It made me realize that being “good” at something isn’t just about skill, it’s also about how seriously you take the possibility of things going wrong. And I feel like we don’t really do that anymore, we trust things like apps and technology without thinking about what’s behind them or who had to sit there and think through all the ways things that could fail.
The Norman reading felt a bit weird to me at first because his whole idea that “attractive things work better” sounded almost too simple, like something you’d see on a Pinterest quote or something, but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized he’s not really talking about the object itself, but about us and how easily we’re affected by how something looks or feels. The part that actually stuck with me was when he says we “overlook design faults” when we’re in a positive emotional state because that just felt very true in an uncomfortable way. Like if something looks nice or feels smooth, we’re way less likely to question it, even if it’s not actually working properly. And that kind of made me disagree with him a little, because it’s not just that beauty helps, it also kind of distracts. It made me think about how often we trust things just because they look polished, and we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
When I put both readings together, they didn’t feel like they were saying the same thing at all, but they still connected in a weird way. Hamilton is so focused on not overlooking anything, even the smallest possible mistake, while Norman is basically saying that we, as people, do overlook things all the time, especially when something feels good or looks nice. And I think that difference between the two readings is what made this interesting for me, and at the same time created that connection in my head of the bigger picture of both readings.