Hope Jo

Hope Jo

The Design of Showing Up
The Design of Showing Up explores how computer science and design might work together to represent the emotional experience of hobbies over time. Today, extreme optimization and productivity plague our culture, turning something that should be fun into another form of work– a side hustle, a thing to master, new content. But what if we shifted hobbies away from performance and metrics, and towards presence, emotional reflection, and simply just showing up?

Through a physical system that quietly captures moments of interaction and reflection, the box builds a personal archive of presence. And over time, these entries accumulate into a record that traces shifts in mindset, energy, and perception, without the performance metrics or pressuring feedback. Data is then translated into a printed archive, experimenting with how data can encourage people to step back and reflect on the larger emotional arc of their experience.

By prioritizing presence over performance and reflection over evaluation, this project proposes an alternative: a system where data supports meaning-making rather than measurement, and where simply showing up becomes the most valuable performance.