Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Better
The reading starts off with the author’s personal teapot collection and notes their unique qualities: one is functionally absurd, one is ugly yet charming, and one is elegantly engineered for the stages of tea brewing. He uses these very objects to back up his claim that usability need not to be in conflict, and that in fact, things that feel good to use and look at actually perform better in our minds because of the emotional state they put us in, and a beautiful product can help a user work through minor problems that the ugly (but functional) counterpart might not. I do agree with his point on prioritizing usability alone can lead to designs that work but feel sterile, and this reminds me of the function over aesthetics mindset that reinforced in architecture, where function almost overshadows how spaces feel for the consumer. However, while I think his argument fits everyday products well, I don’t think it mirrors the same way with how architecture operates under far greater constraints like structure, material, and safety, where poor functional decisions have serious consequences and it is, from what I can see, a context in which aesthetics can’t come first, though an architectural structure can be beautiful, it ultimately has to serve its purpose of being a safe and functional space to the user.
Her Code Got Humans on the Moon
The article follows mathematician Margaret Hamilton who took a programming job at MIT as something temporary while her husband finished law school, and ended up accidentally building the foundation of software engineering while helping land humans on the moon. There came a situation when her daughter crashed the simulator by triggering a program that no astronaut was ever supposed to activate mid flight and although she flagged it as a real issue and wanted to a kind of debugging code to prevent it, NASA pushed back and claimed that astronauts were too well trained for that. Months later, it happened. I think that kind of overconfidence in human perfection is something a lot of institutions fall into, and it actually reminded me of the Titanic. The ship was considered so structurally sound that the people in charge genuinely claimed it as the “unsinkable”, and that certainty is what made them careless about the lifeboats, the speed, and the warnings. I think both cases show the same thing, which is that when you convince yourself something will never happen, you stop preparing for it, and that is exactly when it does. I truly respected Hamilton for making sure, she stayed prepared and her team was ready to fix it when it did go wrong.