Digital Garden - Design Principles

Introduction & Goals

Traditional note-taking and blog-authoring comes in the form of standadized, formal, longform articles. It’s been this way for decades.

“Digital garden” is an alternative system for note-taking. But what is it, exactly? Isn’t this just article-writing but make it hippie? Well kinda yeah. But it’s so much more than that.

This note will explain how I apply the “digital garden” paradigm for my notetaking system, and the guiding design principles in its infrastructure. This mostly applies to my personal & private Obsidian workspace, but it extends to

Heavily inspired by Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden ↗, I want to outline some general design principles to enforce consistency on my own gardening, as well as sharing useful paradigms for the community.

[!scope] These principles follow my own version and flavour with my personal definition of “digital gardening” that best suits me. While all gardens share broad core attributes, each garden is really personalised and may differ.

The best encompassing word (in my view) to describe digital gardens is the word: 🌊 fluid.

We further break down what that means in the next three sections: Organic, Robust, Playful.

O - Organic

Organic means alive. This is the antithesis to not necessary the dead, but rather opposed to an artificial nature.

Which also doesn’t mean absolute zero computer input, nor absolute zero human input. It means more of, providing many avenues and tools to explore and expand information—instead of forcing pre-calculated or pre-configured trails.

This also means that the notetaking system grows into its natural shape and structure, rather than

O1. 🖇️ Densely Linked Information Network

This principle overlaps more with the concepts [[Personal Knowledge Management]] (broken link, note not found) and Second Brains.

• Links changes reading/writing an essay, into → a growing/browsing a wikipedia.
• Also, moving away from just text, to hypertext.
• Take full advantage of linked network, with bi-directional linking with backlinks

O2. 🪴 Linked Topography > Linear Timelines

• usually posts are only discovered by “recently published”
• “Moving away from time-bound streams to contextual knowledge spaces”
• note links as the primary hierarchy and relationship

O3. 🔄 Continuous iteration, never complete

• Articles are formally published and ideally immutable.
• [[Evergreen Notes]] (broken link, note not found)
• knowledge is alive, instead of frozen

R - Robust

Adaptable, accommodates writing whatever you want

R1. 🏗️ Loosely-Structured Play

• Play, having fun while writing, instead of a chore
• There is structure, but it’s more of loose guidelines than strict rules
• Whatever helps to maximise having fun.

R2. 🌈 Content/Topic Diversity

• Different topics (creative writing, tech, knowledge management, etc.)
• encourages experimental adventures! and stuff that i don’t usually talk about

R3. ✴️ Intercropping

• We’ve got formal, we’ve got playful
• Linktrees? Quotes? Scratchpad?
• Could extend to add fancy elements, like interactive widgets
  • or have a note act as a page link to a widget page
• it’s not all just reading text

R4. 🌱 Various maturity

• full refined longform articles
• basic stubs
• halfway-written work

P - Playful

P1. 💩 Okay to be bad quality

• Scared to publish anything, perfectionist paralysis
• Safe space for mistakes and imperfections
• Still aim for quality instead of quantity, but without the burden of formal polish

P2. 🙅‍♂️ Okay to be wrong, biased, limited

• similar to being bad quality, but more so about correctness, fairness, comprehensiveness
• can’t wait for all the takes, just have to admit imperfection

P3. 🏖️ Non-committal

• Commitment and deadlines are helpful to drive output even when unmotivated, but it should stay playful and not become a burden
• Explore different topics and ideas when interested, instead of getting stuck on a piece or series and not having fun

P4. 📢 Unregulated

• Not really a big one personally, but more so for people who publish their creative work and are tied to the publishing platform’s topic restrictions, or by some publisher or supporter
• Of course free speech should also be intertwined with proper consequences of speech.
  • Not all notes are meant to be public, majority of my notes are private.
• If it is proper and good to say, then we should get to express what we want to express, without being maliciously controlled and silenced
• working on refining this point, defining parameters, intro case studies

I don’t really see “independent ownership” as a necessary attribute of digital gardens, though fancy notetakers usually prefer to own and control their content. I think digital gardens on dependant ownership are still valid gardens. So while I advocate for independent ownership, simultaneously, I won’t include it in my definition of digital gardens.

Public Gardens?

• Public?
  • Audience of n
  • Learning in public