I first came across the term Digital Garden while diving into twitter’s design space for my (at the time) design studio Blankform. I had stumbled upon Jacky’s animation transitioning his blog from dawn till dusk.
When I visited his blog, I was greeted with warmth I hadn’t felt on the internet in a long, long time. It felt like stumbling into his corner of the internet.
The idea of a digital garden is often attributed to this blog post by Chris Caufield
[I]magine that instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of things you knew, connected to other people’s wikis about things they knew.
Note how different this sort of meaning making is from what we generally see on today’s web. The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it. More importantly note how meaning changes here. We probably know what the tweet would have “meant”, and what a blog post would have “meant”, but meaning here is something different. Instead of building an argument about the issue this attempts to build a model of the issue that can generate new understandings.
A digital garden is a place for ideas to be planted and grow, not for ideas to be stated. I hope my little garden embodies this spirit.