What is the Digital Garden?
Coined by Mike Caufield during a keynote speech on building digital spaces, the Digital Garden was a different way of thinking about our online behavior around information. Unlike digital streams, digital gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Think Instagram or Messenger versus Wikipedia. Gardens emphasize the slow growth of ideas through writing, rewriting, editing, and revising thoughts in public.
Garden image with digital categories/sub categories as and example
Patterns of Digital Gardens
Topography over Timelines
Gardens are organized around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it’s connected to others.
This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date.
Gardens don’t consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren’t the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.
Continued Growth
Gardens are never finished, they’re constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
Gardens are designed to evolve alongside your thoughts. When you first have an idea, it’s fuzzy and unrefined. You might notice a pattern in your corner of the world, but need to collect evidence, consider counter-arguments, spot similar trends, and research who else has thunk such thoughts before you. In short, you need to do your homework and critically think about it over time.
Imperfection & Learning in Public
Gardens are imperfect by design. They don’t hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
Playful, Personal and Experimental
Gardens are non-homogenous by nature. You can plant the same seeds as your neighbour, but you’ll always end up with a different arrangement of plants.
Digital gardens should be just as unique and particular as their vegetative counterparts. The point of a garden is that it’s a personal playspace. You organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that match your way of thinking, rather than off someone else’s standardized template.
Intercropping & Content Diversity
Gardens are not just a collection of interlinked words. While linear writing is an incredible medium that has served us well for a little over 5000 years, it is daft to pretend working in a single medium is a sufficient way to explore complex ideas.
It is also absurd to ignore the fact we’re living in an audio-visual cornucopia that the web makes possible. Podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations, interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets, rough sketches, and code snippets should all live and grow in the garden.
Navigating the plot
Description and key vocab of posts (seed, bud, flower, bi directional links, etc.). Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Garden image with digital categories/sub categories as and example