A little bit of history on the concept. 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 garden’s 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.
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 neighbor, 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 play space. You organize the garden around the ideas and mediums that match your way of thinking, rather than off someone else’s standardized template.
Intercropping & Content Diversity
Digital streams reward dedication to a single lane. However, access to diverse thinking and topics has made exploration easier than ever. The digital garden is an alternative way to interact with interests through diversity not only of thought, but also for mediums. Podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations, interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets, rough sketches, and code snippets all live and grow in the garden.