Restoration, Renewal, Recovery
Ending is better than mending
Kanawa-tsugi
When our tools are broken, we feel broken
I could do better than that
No ordinary objects
Responsibility for the sidewalk
I'm sorry, I love engineers
Repair
Little by little
Crafting repair
Hyperart: Thomasson
Snipping the dead blooms
Builder Brain
Rethinking Repair
Maintenance and Care
A time to build and a time to repair
Can maintenance save civilisation?
Makers and Making
Chesterton’s Fence
The McDonald’s Theory of Creativity
Imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting
Feature parity
The way we usually do infrastructure
Broken world thinking
Semi-detached houses, 2019
How the light gets in
A Quote by Leonard CohenThere is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.The Maintainers
A WebsiteThe Maintainers, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Our members come from a variety of backgrounds, including engineers and business leaders, academic historians and social scientists, government and non-profit agencies, artists, activists, coders, and more.
Trees and graphs
A tree is a kind of graph, but a graph can be considerably more complex than a tree.
I have reason to believe, which for brevity’s sake I will treat elsewhere, that the most complex class of processes and structures we humans can consciously prescribe, reduces mathematically to a tree. A tree has a top, bottom, left and right. Its branches fan out from the trunk and they don’t intersect with one another. They are discrete, contiguous, identifiable objects which persist across time. Trees are Things.
Software and websites, however, reduce to arbitrarily more complex structures: they are graphs. A graph has no meaningful orientation whatsoever. No sequence, no obvious start or end—at least none that we can intuit. It is better considered not as one Thing, but as a federation of Things, like the brain or a fungus network, or perhaps a composite artifact left behind from an ongoing process, like an ant colony or human city.