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notes

a public log of notes and thoughts
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1
Aug 3
Web as room
Website as room
In an age of information overload, a room is comforting because it’s finite, often with a specific intended purpose.
#personalsoftware
2
Aug 3
Web
The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corporations—like Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Google.
#personalsoftware
3
Mar 29
No settings
We embraced constraints that removed unnecessary decisions and focused your creative energy on expression. To us, this meant no fiddly settings for brush size or sliders to dial in a specific color.
#interfaces
4
Jun 8
Gathering
“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”
#digitalarchive
5
Jun 8
Gathering 2
“Gathering, for Le Guin, is not a masculine, techno-utopian process of disruption or of moving fast and breaking things, but the methodical, deep labor that comes from “looking around, rather than looking ahead,” from gathering rather than hunting.”
#digitalarchive
6
Jun 8
Gathering 3
“Gathering is, in this way, not the act of aggregation alone. It is not an automated collection or the formal acquisition of works for an institution, nor is it the plundering or extraction of resources from a neighboring region. It is the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for introspection around those goods. “
#digitalarchive
7
Feb 28
Prototype
What’s the purpose of your prototype? Role, Implementation, Look and Feel
#design
8
Feb 2
Meal
An app can be a homecooked meal - The list of reasons to “learn to cook” overflows, and only a handful have anything to do with the marketplace. This feels natural; anyone who has ever, like… eaten a meal… of any kind… recognizes that cooking is marbled deeply into domesticity and comfort, nerdiness and curiosity, health and love.
.
#personalsoftware
#intimacy
9
Feb 2
Uselessness
“It’s not a waste of time to just go off an do something completely useless, be bad at it, and be proud of what you made in it. ...Making tools that are silly, sweet, pointless, and offer some strange creative task, are important in helping un-internalize a lot of that.
#learning
10
Feb 2
Situated
“Situated software isn’t a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users, and a refusal to embrace scale, generality or completeness as unqualified virtues.
#personalsoftware
#intimacy
11
Feb 2
nice things i’d like to see in the world

#journaling
12
Jan 22
Hard Fun
“Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. “
#learning
13
Jan 16
Understanding Tech
“It shouldn’t be a privilege to understand how technology works. It should be a right. You should know how things work around you. You don’t need to be a superstar coder. You just need a basic understanding.” - Salome Asega
#digitalequity
14
Jan 16
World Building
I have never actually asked myself what world I want to live in. How would I execute that?
#technology
15
Jan 16
Feedback
“It’s like we’ve all automated our feedback so much that nobody gets any real feedback”

#collaboration
16
Jan 16
Trust
“Moving at the speed of trust”
#communities
17
Jan 12
Soft Tech
Instead of a content feed of communication and crap and having to constantly shout, what if we imagined the internet more like a place full of whispers. With small, safe, cozy rooms where you can whisper and share and people can drop in respectfully only to hear what you have to say. Where you may not have much to say but you can see others, like whispers, like letters left in mailboxes, like notes left on a desk that you can’t reply to, like voicemails that are forgotten, like an etching on a tree, those locks on the bridges in Paris, like bedroom dancing. More like a stamp of I was here, a trace, sometimes an invitation for others to leave a notch.
#intimacy
#digitalspaces
18
Jan 12
How can we re-contextualize digital public spaces?

How can you take over public spaces on the web: youtube comments, google maps, reviews, wikipedia, more, what are other spaces
#digitalspaces
19
Jan 12
New Public Festival: Why the internet needs better public spaces
Intensity of interaction - who designs the public spaces, not just what kinds of public spaces are created
Rescue space where there had been none
Make visible how many kids were actually in the neighborhood
Software is driven by this “frontier” mentality, but how can you re-claim unused space or other spaces, repurpose space?
Recontextualizing spaces
Informal society: what does it look like when it’s unbounded space
#publicspace
#digitalspaces
20
Jan 4
Using an infinite canvas to set the pace of a comic, and change the linear narrative.
Infinite canvas web comic McClendon fumet time puffs of smoke, what if the comic changes over the day or week , we toon, always scrolling, interfaces that slow you down, with ouroiseful speed bumps , games are something else but just pictures and text where pacing is key
#webcomics
#interfaces
21
Dec 9
Timeful
“How might one create timeful texts—texts with affordances extending the authored experience over weeks and months, texts which continue the conversation with the reader as they slowly integrate those ideas into their lives?” - AM
#writing
#time
22
Dec 9
Archiving
How do people leave information about themselves behind, what does it mean to make a personal record and why do people do it?
#death
#digitalarchive
#personalarchiving
23
Dec 9
Using the Google “Inactive Account Manager”
“The Inactive Account Manager allows you to specify a period of inactivity after which you can specify the disposition of your individual various accounts (Gmail, Docs, YouTube,Photos, Plus, etc.) Inactive Account Manager is “a way for users to share parts of their account data or notify someone if they’ve been inactive for a certain period of time.”


It’s not just about preparing for death in terms of logistics, but about finding the bits of you that you want to share, highlight, make available to others
How weird is it that you can leave a message to others once you die through an auto reply
This is without a doubt the most morbid place on the internet
How are you supposed to decide what message to leave your family as your forever auto reply
Why does setting this up make me feel like I am about to die, is this what it feels like to prepare a will?
How can you reduce that stress?
How can we avoid those black mirror scenarios where the AI bot replaces me
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#death
#digitalarchive
24
Dec 9
Family
The pursuit of family history and origins tends to be shaped by several motives, including the desire to carve out a place for one's family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling.
#personalarchiving
25
Dec 9
Data Preservation
Physically this data might exist somewhere but the challenge is making it accessible to future historians.
#digitalarchive
26
Dec 9
Personal Curation
“Consider devoting a rainy weekend to pulling out your collection. At this point you will be surveying its broad landscape.” “Old letters give you a sense of the people, even if there’s not much to the letters and cards. It shows you what they valued.”
#personalarchiving
#digitalarchive
27
Dec 9
Grandparents
I tried to create somewhat of an archive for both of my grandparents and have failed multiple times. Once I scanned pictures from an old album and they ended up on a harddrive someplace never backed up. Another time I created videos of my grandfather which disappeared. I’ve also taken audio files of my grandma and that too disappeared. What was the solution, should I have take uploaded it all to a specific place, on dropbox? I think a lot about this lost data.
​
#death
#personalarchiving
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