notes

“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.”

“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.”

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. “

What’s the purpose of your prototype? Role, Implementation, Look and Feel

An app can be a homecooked meal.

“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.

“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.

nice things i’d like to see in the world

“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. “

“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 understandingg.”

What can technology be good for

“It’s like we’ve all automated our feedback so much that nobody gets any real feedback”

“Moving at the speed of trust”

A more intimate internet

How can we re-contextualize digital public spaces?

New Public Festival: Why the internet needs better public spaces

Using an infinite canvas to set the pace of a comic, and change the linear narrative.

“How might one create

—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

How do people leave information about themselves behind, what does it mean to make a personal record and why do people do it?

Using the Google “Inactive Account Manager”

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.

Physically this data might exist somewhere but the challenge is making it accessible to future historians.

“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.”

Grandparents