You find reasons to keep living Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living. Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke Prometheus sufferinghopelife
The modern infrastructural ideal The form and possibility of the "modern infrastructural ideal" is increasingly under threat, as cracks (sometimes literal ones) show up in our bridges, our highways, our airports, and the nets of our social welfare systems. For these and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practices and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today. Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time. Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair How Buildings Learn infrastructurehope
500 Days of Summer A Film by Marc Webb, Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber www.imdb.com I think you should look againIt just wasn't me you were right about lovemelancholyhope
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
A little act of hope A Fragment by Jeremy Keith adactio.com As I scroll down my “on this day” page, I come across more and more dead links that have been snapped off from the fabric of the web. If I stop and think about it, it can get quite dispiriting. Why bother making hyperlinks at all? It’s only a matter of time until those links break. In a sense, every hyperlink on the World Wide Web is little act of hope. Even though I know that when I link to something, it probably won’t last, I still harbour that hope. If hyperlinks are built on hope, and the web is made of hyperlinks, then in a way, the World Wide Web is quite literally made out of hope. I like that. And thus the heart will break hypermediahope
On Greatness What’s important to you in the development of a product? One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease — I’ve seen other people get it too — it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can just go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you can’t make electrons do, there are certain things you can’t make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic. Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview The idea grows as they workThe Design SquiggleThe Nature of Product ideascraft