On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity

I understand digital gardens as online spaces where many people are coming together to tend to seeds, which can be understood as content. The container that digital gardens are held in is a commitment to sustainability, pluralism, and cyclical growth. It entails adaptation and a culture of learning.

A digital garden is a framework for speculation around how online space can be designed from the imagination of gardens. Here, the values of gardens, pluralism, interdependence, sustainability, adaptation, and discovery are centered in the design process of technosocial spaces.

A garden is usually a place where things grow.

Gardens can be very personal and full of whimsy or a garden can be a source of food and substance.

We gather and work together in community gardens to share the labor as well as the rewards of a collective effort.

It's a comparison that you can take very far. From "planting seeds" and "pulling weeds" to t... See more

The digital garden is a personal, wiki-like space collecting ever growing, in-process notes. It’s like a far less polished blog - more wild, densely tangled and interlinked.

the whole point of digital gardens is that they can grow and change, and that various pages on the same topic can coexist. “It’s less about iterative learning and more about public learning,”

Some suggested that the digital garden was a backlash to the internet we’ve become grudgingly accustomed to, where things go viral, change is looked down upon, and sites are one-dimensional.