I believe that the Moon Machines: Navigation Computer documentary presents a good example, a good argument of why careful design is important in almost every piece of technology one sets out to make.
In my opinion, the documentary presents the story of the computer (and computer software) that guided the navigatio of the first Apollo mission to go around the moon and back. It mainly presents such story through the experiences of the 'programmers' and engineers behind that project. People who were (at the time) young students from MIT.
These people tell stories of something that ended up being a software project, but at a peculiar time in which software was a very new thing. As such, it is evident that the study of it's contruction and the processes behind it were not a thing yet. It is in those personal stories by the developers in which the argument for the need of a study of software making study becomes evident. The tales of the developers and of the unfolding of the project are stories of hardship, of problems that software projects of today sometimes suffer too.
With the knowledge we have today it was easy to look at the problems they mention: being behind schedule, and having the role project demoted because of it's lack of readyness, as a consequence of the lack of experience and planning that they had. But it is also not hard to relate to the frustrations they underwent as precursors to these problems: not eve knowing or planning what they were supposed to do, having no clear goal or requirement in mind at the beginning and poor organization between the teams of software and hardware.
I think that those people, thosw first developers, are to thank for the knowledge that today, to a certain extent, shields us from falling into doing the same. For the knowledge that software is just another piece of technology product of engineering, and that like any other engineering project, ends up being better if coming from processes of design, planning and careful thinking.
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