Category: F2025 – Mang

The balance between aesthetics and usefulness has always been a hot topic. My perspective on beauty and productivity is that if something does its job well, that is enough. I used to value productivity more than aesthetics. According to the reading, for a product to be truly beautiful, it “has to fulfill a useful function, work well, and be usable and understandable” (p. 7). I agree with this idea because if a product does not serve its intended purpose, it fails to justify its existence.

However, in reality, this is not always the case. Take Apple, for example. People love Apple products because they are well-designed and undeniably beautiful. Yet, in terms of productivity, they may not always be the most practical option. MacBooks, for instance, perform most of the functions that a laptop should, but they lack a USB port. While users can buy external hubs, many find it inconvenient and would prefer at least one built-in port. Despite this, people continue to buy MacBooks. The success of Apple’s stock market performance suggests that many consumers value aesthetics just as much as, or even more than, productivity.

The next reading, about the code that helped send people to the moon, reminded me of the importance of checking and rechecking every detail. It shows why it is essential to anticipate every possible error, even those that seem unlikely or unnecessary. Launching the P01 program midflight might have seemed like a situation that would never occur, but it did. If Lauren had not accounted for this scenario, the outcome for Jim Lovell and the mission could have been very different.

Attractive things Work Better

I’ve always noticed how looks can open doors. It’s something people like to call pretty privilege. In most industries, they prefer someone who has good looks. You see it everywhere at the airport check-in counter where the smiling, well-dressed staff makes you feel calm, or in a company that hires someone polished to sit at the front desk because, somehow, they represent the brand better.

We are naturally drawn to beauty, whether it’s a charming smile or a sleek phone screen. Companies know this; that’s why a tech gadget with a glowing logo or a car with smooth curves often sells better than a clunky but equally powerful competitor. Don Norman’s idea that “attractive things work better” isn’t just about vanity. it’s about psychology.

A MacBook isn’t the fastest laptop in the world, and yet when we open that smooth aluminum case and feel the satisfying click of the keys, we tend to believe it’s faster, smarter, and somehow more capable. The elegant design creates a sense of trust and delight that shapes how we experience the product. The beauty of it literally makes us think it works better.

Attractive design doesn’t just sell. It softens us. It makes us more patient with flaws, more forgiving of errors, and more willing to explore. That’s the secret power of beauty: it opens the door for better experiences.

Norman explains this beautifully in “Attractive Things Work Better.” He talks about how our emotions influence the way we interact with the world. When something looks good, it makes us feel good and when we feel good, we actually perform better. He even gives a simple example: imagine walking on a wooden plank that’s safely on the ground you’d stroll across without a second thought. But put that same plank high in the air, and suddenly, your fear takes over, your body stiffens, and it becomes ten times harder. The situation didn’t change; your feelings did.

That’s what happens with design too. When we see something beautiful like a teapot with elegant curves or a smartphone that feels right in our hands it puts us in a positive mood. We become more relaxed, more open, and surprisingly, even more creative. Norman calls this the power of positive affect. It’s why we forgive a beautiful product for small flaws but get frustrated quickly with an ugly one, even if it works just as well.

So when I think about “pretty privilege,” it’s not just about faces or appearances it’s about how beauty changes behavior. Attractive people, like attractive designs, create comfort and trust before a single word is spoken or a single button is pressed. And through this text, I feel like it helped me see that aesthetics aren’t shallow; they’re psychological. Beauty works because it changes us somehow.

Her Code Got Humans On The Moon — And Invented Software Itself

When I was in eighth grade, our school hosted a  movie event through a club called Global Female in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics). They showed movie called “Hidden Figures” which is  the story of three brilliant African-American women, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, whose work made NASA’s early space missions possible. I remember sitting there, completely mesmerized, realizing for the first time how many women had shaped history from behind the scenes, only to have their names forgotten.

Since that day, I’ve carried a quiet admiration, and maybe a little fire, for women in STEM who were never given the recognition they deserved. Now, as a Computer Science major myself, I’ve felt small moments of that same bias. Sometimes, it’s a look that says “are you sure you can do this?” It’s subtle, but it stings like being told you have to prove your worth twice before anyone believes it once.

That’s why reading about Margaret Hamilton hit differently and fill me up with pride. Here was a woman in the 1960s, leading a team at MIT, writing code that would land humans on the moon  all while raising her daughter.

The image of her bringing her little girl to the lab late at night felt so familiar. My mom, also a working mother in STEM, used to take me to her computer lab  when I used to be alone. Margaret’s story reminded me of my mother of every woman who’s ever juggled passion, work, and motherhood with quiet strength.

What moved me most was how Margaret didn’t just write code; she invented software engineering itself. She gave structure, respect, and permanence to something the world didn’t even consider a real science yet. And when her code saved the Apollo 11 mission, it wasn’t just a victory for NASA. It was proof that brilliance has no gender.

Reading her story filled me with pride. It made me realize that every time a woman like Margaret Hamilton, or my mother, or even I sit behind a computer and type, we’re not just writing code. We’re continuing a legacy.

Norman’s ideas highlight that aesthetics are not just surface decoration but a way for design to work with the human mind rather than against it. When something looks and feels good to use, our brains relax into a more open, imaginative mode. We stop fighting the interface and start exploring through it. This isn’t about luxury or indulgence. It’s about survival in a world full of cognitive overload. A beautiful interface lowers emotional friction, it turns stress into curiosity. Even something as small as the choice of a teapot, depending on mood, shows how design can become a companion to our emotional state. Good design doesn’t simply function well It cares for the user’s attention, focus, and resilience, allowing “pleasure” to become a quiet form of intelligence.

Margaret’s “software engineering” wasn’t only about logic and precision, but it was about understanding the unpredictable human behind the code. When Hamilton built systems that could recover from error, she was acknowledging fear as real variables in the machine. She designed not for perfection but for forgiveness. The Apollo guidance software’s ability to prioritize critical tasks during overload was, at its core, a kind of empathy written in code. It recognized that even astronauts under pressure could make mistakes, and that the system should protect rather than punish them. Hamilton’s foresight turned technical design into an act of emotional intelligence, embedding trust and calm into the most high-stakes environment imaginable.

Norman and Hamilton sketch a fuller philosophy of design, one that sees beauty and reliability, emotion and logic, not as opposites but as collaborators. Norman’s teapot and Hamilton’s Apollo code both remind us that good design anticipates human vulnerability and builds grace into its response. Whether the context is a kitchen or a lunar landing, the designer’s role is to create conditions where people can think clearly, act confidently, and recover gently from error. The aesthetic and the algorithm share the same goal: to make complexity humane.

Reading Norman’s Emotion & Design and Her Code Got Humans on the Moon made me rethink what we usually praise in tech. Norman’s main idea that “attractive things work better” makes sense at first. If a product is enjoyable to use, we’re more likely to stick with it. But honestly, it feels a bit too neat. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it works well. I’ve had plenty of apps or gadgets that are gorgeous but a pain to actually use. Norman makes a strong point about emotion shaping usability, but sometimes I feel designers lean on aesthetics as a crutch instead of solving real problems.

On the other hand, Her Code Got Humans on the Moon reminded me that behind every “perfect” design or software is a ton of human effort — in this case, women programmers whose work literally made moon landings possible. It’s wild how long their contributions were invisible. It makes me question why we hype technology itself while ignoring the people who make it run. The “heroic inventor” story Norman sometimes leans on in design discussions seems incomplete — we rarely celebrate the actual humans doing the work.

Putting these together, I think the readings challenge the usual tech narrative. Norman focuses on emotion and aesthetics, which are important, but Her Code highlights that real success comes from skill, persistence, and problem-solving. My takeaway? Great design isn’t just about looking or feeling good — it’s also about respecting and acknowledging the humans who make it work. Otherwise, we’re praising the wrong things and missing the bigger picture.

 

Attractive Things Work Better

I found this reading surprisingly relatable (although initially with the 3 teapots, I was a little confused). Norman’s main point that beauty and usability aren’t opposites and that they can co-exist, really made me rethink how I view design. He talks about how our emotions directly affect how we perform tasks. For example, negative affect (like anxiety) actually focuses the mind, which I never thought about before. I used to assume all anxiety was bad, but Norman explains that in situations where quick focus is needed, like immediate problem-solving, that stress can actually help.

What also stood out to me was the idea that people are more forgiving of poor design when they’re in a positive mood. I’ve totally felt that. When I’m calm, I barely notice small glitches on Brightspace, but when I’m stressed,  like submitting an assignment at the last minute, the same delay feels ten times longer and way more frustrating.

I liked his reflection about beauty too, especially the part about how true beauty isn’t just surface-level. A product can look good, but to be truly beautiful, it has to work well and make sense to use. That reminded me of how we say “beauty is in the character” for people; Norman’s basically saying that the same applies to design. Beauty in products has to go deeper than aesthetics, it has to come from function, usability, and how it makes us feel.

Overall, this reading made me realize that emotion is not a distraction in design, it’s actually a tool. How we feel shapes how we interact, and that’s something I’ll keep in mind whenever I evaluate or create something from now on.

Her Code Got Humans On The Moon — And Invented Software Itself

I really enjoyed this reading, especially the part where the author points out that one of the “founding fathers” of software was actually a mother. I thought that was both funny and powerful. It highlights how Margaret Hamilton broke stereotypes in a field that was (and still is) dominated by men. The story captured how she managed to fit into that environment, joking around with her colleagues and saying she was “one of the guys”,  but also how she stood out because of her intelligence and persistence. What struck me most was how her higher-ups ignored her idea for error checking, insisting astronauts were “too well-trained to make mistakes.” It reminded me of a previous reading where we discussed how engineers often think so logically that they expect others to be perfect, almost machine-like. But humans aren’t machines, and Hamilton proved that. When an astronaut actually made the very mistake she had warned about, it became her “I told you so” moment,  except it came with nine hours of problem-solving that could’ve been avoided.

As a computer science major, I found it fascinating that error checking wasn’t considered intuitive back then. Today, we’re taught to expect mistakes and build systems that can handle them, but that mindset didn’t exist yet. Hamilton’s work showed that great engineering isn’t just about logic, it’s about anticipating imperfection, because humans are imperfect anyways. 

For Norman’s piece, I was very surprised to find it very relatable as I initially didn’t quite understand where he was going with his vast knowledge of teapots, but I later realized that he was talking about a feeling I actually had trouble verbalizing a few months ago. I had a conversation with some friends where I wanted to describe how much the visual design of a certain aspect of something I was trying to learn significantly affected how passionate I felt toward learning that ‘something.” While my friends wrote me off as just a little picky with my peripherals, Norman’s point on “aesthetic pleasure” improving perceived usability of something really made me feel validated. For example, just having a pretty bass guitar will make me feel more likely to pick it up to practice it seriously rather than just have it lying around.

The general idea of emotional design was very interesting, and it reminded me of the sound design of my midterm project. The sound design alone was motivating me through countless playtests against myself. It was because I designed the SFX to hit a certain metaphorical chord in my brain that I felt more passionate about the final result. It made me even happier to hear positive feedback on the SFX design from my fellow peers as it was honestly just designed in a way that was personally satisfying to me; other people enjoying it was definitely an unseen externality.

I had previously read about Margaret Hamilton’s story back in 2019 when we had the first visualization of an event horizon/black hole back. One of the parts that resonated with me most was that Hamilton ran to her computer after a late-night party to fix some faulty code she thought about at the party. I think this shows just how much pride Hamilton had in her role on the Apollo missions, and just how brilliant she was. Her quote, “I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me” shows me a lot of her prideful but grounded nature that I found very inspiring.

 

Her Code Got Humans on the Moon – And Invented Software Itself

I’ve known about Margaret Hamilton for quite some time. Her name was the one I would give out when people asked me who my favourite woman in STEM was, and the picture in the reading is the same one that went viral on social media a while ago. Nevertheless, I was mostly familiar with her accomplishments, and I was quite shocked to find out that she had a daughter at this time, over whom she would be criticized. It only makes me think even higher of her.

I really liked it when Hamilton said, “I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me.” This shows that Hamilton was very well aware that the stakes of her work went far beyond code or computation. Also, I think her ability to think of potential failures before they happen is what made her so exceptional, and this is a skill that all programmers should try to build. Therefore, a certain attentiveness to detail and analysis of possible outcomes can help build stronger and more reliable programs.

My favorite quote of hers is, “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.”

Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better

This reading made me realize that emotion plays such a big role in the things we use. An example is Norman owning three teapots, which I found quite funny. He doesn’t really need 3 teapots, but it’s about the feeling that each one brings, and the fact that each teapot brings its own experience.

This idea also connects to what I’ve been learning in my Have a Seat class, where we design and build chairs. I’ve realized that a chair is never just a chair, it holds an emotional presence in a space. The curve of the backrest, the texture of the wood, even the way light hits it can make someone feel calm, inspired, or comforted. Just like in Norman’s article, emotion becomes part of usability. When people feel good around a design, they tend to engage with it more positively, and that’s when it truly “works better.”

I used to think that attractive designs were somehow less practical. Growing up, I often heard that bright or playful designs were less “serious.” But this article completely challenges that idea. Beauty can enhance function rather than distract from it. So I guess my main takeaway from this reading is that human beings are drawn to designs that are not just usable, but that bring pleasure, comfort, and meaning. 

What links Donald Norman’s “Emotion and Design” and Robert McMillan’s profile of Margaret Hamilton is that both quietly insist on humanizing it, instead of just dealing with design . Norman’s argument that beautiful design makes people feel more in control is not just about colors or curves. It’s about the psychology of trust. He claims that people “perform better when they feel better,” suggesting that aesthetics aren’t superficial, but functional. I find this somewhat persuasive, but also a little idealistic. There’s truth to it, I do feel calmer using Notion than some clunky university portal, but sometimes “pretty” products mask poor usability. Attractive things may appear to work better, but that illusion can also hide deeper flaws. Still, Norman’s point stands: emotion isn’t a side effect of design rather it’s part of the system itself.

Reading “Her Code Got Humans on the Moon” right after feels like the necessary reality check. Margaret Hamilton’s code didn’t have the luxury of being “attractive,” it just had to not crash on the Moon. Yet what she achieved was, in its own way, a kind of beauty: the beauty of precision, foresight, and calm under cosmic pressure. Her work (from inventing the concept of “software engineering” to preventing the Apollo 11 disaster) captures design stripped to its core: solving human problems with clarity and empathy. I love how she described her philosophy as “preparing for the unexpected.” That’s the emotional intelligence of a designer without ever calling it that

If Norman celebrates how design makes us feel, Hamilton reminds us what design must do: sustain life when it matters. My takeaway is that emotion in design isn’t always about pleasure; sometimes it’s about responsibility. The most beautiful designs are the ones that don’t panic when everything else does.

What I immediately noticed in the readings is how both Don Norman and Robert McMillan challenge how we define functionality; Norman through the psychology of aesthetics, and McMillan through the ingenuity of software engineering. Reading “Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Better” made me question something simple yet profound: why do I find certain interfaces or objects “trustworthy”? Norman’s claim that “attractive things work better” stayed with me because it connects emotion to cognition, arguing that beauty is not decoration but an active force in usability. His description of positive affect broadening creative thought resonated with me, especially when I considered my own design projects in other Interactive Media courses I have taken. When a prototype looks cohesive and inviting, I find myself more patient while debugging it; frustration fades faster. Norman’s teapot metaphor illustrates this perfectly, the emotional experience of interacting with a design changes how we perceive its flaws.

In contrast, McMillan’s “Her Code Got Humans on the Moon” celebrates the emotional labor and intellectual rigor behind Margaret Hamilton’s software for Apollo 11. I was surprised by how Hamilton’s story complicates the idea that engineering is purely rational. Her insistence on accounting for human error, writing software that could correct an astronaut’s mistake, echoes Norman’s belief that design must accommodate emotion and imperfection. When Hamilton’s code prevented a lunar crash due to a data overload, it wasn’t just logic at work but empathy, the foresight to design for failure.

Together, these texts made me rethink the separation between “soft” and “hard” skills in design. Emotion and logic, art and code, are not opposites but co-creators of reliability. I’m left wondering: in a future dominated by AI systems, can machines be designed to “care” the way Hamilton’s software did, to anticipate human error with grace?

Her Code Got Humans On The Earth

Margaret Hamilton’s story resonates with me as an aspiring software engineer, especially seeing how she navigated a world that wasn’t built for her. She was able to bring her daughter Lauren to the lab on weekends, letting her sleep on the floor while she coded into the night. That choice wasn’t just about balancing work and family, but showing both are achievable. This  actually saved a mission, when Lauren accidentally crashed the Apollo simulator by pressing P01 during flight, Hamilton saw the danger immediately and warned NASA. They brushed her off, insisting astronauts were too perfect to make mistakes and did not take her concern seriously. But during Apollo 8, astronaut Jim Lovell did exactly what Lauren had done, wiping out all the navigation data. Hamilton and her team spent nine hours finding a fix to bring them home. Hamilton wasn’t just writing code, she was inventing the entire idea of software engineering in real-time, creating the practices we still rely on today. Her work reminds me that the best engineers aren’t the ones who assume everything will go perfectly, but the ones who plan for when it doesn’t. Her thinking of all branches of an act is what makes her an incredible software engineer.

Attractive Things Work Better

As someone studying computer science, Norman’s argument that “attractive things work better” initially felt weird to hear, like permission to prioritise aesthetics over functionality. But it makes sense as good designs should balance both aesthetics and usability, creating experiences that are functional and resonant. What really resonated was his point about positive affect making us more tolerant of minor difficulties. When I’m working with tools that feel good to use, I don’t rage-quit when I hit a bug. But when I’m already stressed and the interface is terrible, every small friction angers me more. This is why critical systems, like hospital applications, should be completely simple and understandable, while something non-critical like a coffee ordering app can afford to prioritise delight over efficiency.

However, I’m uncertain whether beauty can truly compensate for poor usability. Norman says “when we feel good, we overlook design faults,” but this happens far too often with modern apps. Apple’s system apps, from the clock to the calculator, are aesthetically beautiful but frustratingly impractical for users who need advanced features.

Still, I agree with his main point, we’re not computers evaluating products on pure utility. We’re emotional beings, and our feelings genuinely affect our performance. As engineers, we should build things that not only work but also make people feel capable and confident.