Story
Below are excerpts from Scuttlebutt private messages exchanged between @dinosaur (Michael Williams) and @glyph (Andrew Reid) at the start of their collaboration in early-2018. These conversations helped tell the story of what PeachCloud was to become:
@dinosaur
for me, i know at least one story in my mind, which relates to the story i told you about solarpunk trailer parks.
in the book Walkaway, i was struck by how computers were portrayed. every home had a computer system to help automate the household. and not just physical automation as we know it today (automated cooking, automation fabrication, etc), but so much was social automation, group resource coordination, task planning and management. that’s what i find most exciting.
so for me, PeachCloud is part of a larger story about every household having a home computer, which helps them connect with others, which helps them communicate with others, which helps them coordinate shared resources with others, which helps them get shit done with others.
then, if every home (and the corresponding infrastructure) itself is modular, portable, reproducible, and enjoyable, then our home computers can support us in this ever-evolving lifestyle. i find this future very exciting!
@glyph
I love the vision you put forward of the houeshold as facilitator of connecting, communicating, coordinating and acting.
Perhaps it’ll come as no surprise, but I couldn’t help thinking of mycelium while reading your messages. I think this connects beautifully with what you shared about your Spirit-Being / Creature being a Tree: nurturing, calm, stable, sensorially-opened and receptive, deeply-rooted, seasonally-responsive. This also seems like a great metaphor for the household. Who wouldn’t want to dwell in a tree?! So then, perhaps PeachCloud could be envisioned as part of the rhizosphere of the household; the digital access-point to the Reciprocity Transport Layer (RTL) [fundamentally about sharing with one another and growing together].
Here’s a little sketch I did this morning, inspired by your thoughts (there are some mixed metaphors / concerns in there but I think it’ll make sense to you). I took a high-level pass at thinking about measures of project success…will think-feel into this more deeply as we go. I also used the tree metaphor as a way to think about the layering of the interface:
