Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison An Article by Austin Kleon & Olivia Laing austinkleon.com A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments. I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.” Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death. Poison sniffers hopereadinggoodness
When engineers refuse to leave well enough alone In a column entitled "March of the Engineers," the humorist and social critic Russell Baker lamented the complexity and sophistication of his office's new telephone system...Baker closed his column by defining the new telephone system as "another bleak example of the horrors created when engineers refuse to leave well enough alone." In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman wrote that "new telephone systems have proven to be another excellent example of incomprehensible design." Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things The Design of Everyday Things uxfeatures