Gardens

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

In my practice I turn code (such as HTML) into material form. By superimposing structural, system-based and interface components from the Internet over processes in the material world (and vice versa), new perspectives on the "nature" of either world are encountered. In recent years I have been focusing especially on interfaces of data collection, foremost HTML <input> fields... The project I have started at ChaNorth during the very inspiring "ProcessPark" Residency(*) in April 2018 is called INPUT FIELD FORM #2 and materializes an HTML based Web-form into an agricultural layout for growing plants and serving food, creating edible HTML.

...The INPUT FIELD FORM "garden" is structured by the Web form's functionality, and each agricultural "sub-field" therefore is dedicated to a specific functionality in the online Input Field. Instead of taking data from the "users", it is given back to them in the form of food that has grown inside the installation.

I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way.

The “slow food” movement encourages people to take the time to cook and savor meals made with love. It emphasizes care rather than the efficiency and utilitarianism of “fast food”.

What does the software version of that look like?

The typical software application is a product of a business trying to maximize profit and efficiency. There is a constant push to release new features and upgrades as quickly as possible, at the lowest cost possible. “Quality” is defined as the minimum possible bar that is still acceptable to paying customers. It is designed with the same priorities as “fast food”.

Of course, “slow” in the software world usually refers to annoyingly unresponsive user experiences. But here I mean “slow” in the sense that the software itself was designed and built slowly and with care, the same way that a meal can be prepared and eaten slowly and with care. Such software is likely to actually be more responsive because its architecture has been more carefully honed.

Radio Garden invites you to explore live radio from around the world.

By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.

Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.

Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.

Guerrilla gardening, the act of cultivating plants on land not owned by the gardener, blossomed in the 1970s as a form of activism and ‘community beautification’. It began in New York City with Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group, who transformed a derelict private lot into a thriving garden. The movement quickly spread, fueled by a desire to reclaim neglected spaces.

...A simple idea, that was perfectable spreadable.

How Many Plants was built by a particularly passionate houseplant obsessive, but it's here for all plant parents, seasoned enthusiasts and first-timers alike. By cutting through the disparate and often contradictory advice that seems to grow like weeds around all corners of the internet, HMP strives for clarity. With confidence-boosting plant guides and deep dives into everything from what we mean when we say "bright indirect light" to a very-calm-totally-not-freaking-out identification of the little critters ailing your plants, HMP is here to help you on your journey to plant-based happiness!

Hand-in-hand with a passion for plants comes a love for design. With an eye for interiors, each plant guide highlights handy cues for narrowing in on the "big frilly leaf with wide-load growth potential" perfect for that cozy corner of your bedroom.

Gardening, but with emojis and less time.

And if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale,
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil.
Consider the flowers: they don't try to look right;
They just open their petals and turn to the light.

A kind of commonplace book.
A kind of digital garden.
A kind of Zettelkasten.
The front end to a brain.

Part research,
part dissertation,
part art project.

A kind of essay,
in the sense that it is
an attempt.

...but at what?

I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers.

Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.

There is a story of Rikyu which well illustrates the ideas of cleanliness entertained by the tea masters. Rikyu was watching his son Shoan as he swept and watered the garden path. "Not clean enough," said Rikyu, when Shoan had finished his task, and bade him try again. After a weary hour the son turned to Rikyu: "Father, there is nothing more to be done. The steps have been washed for the third time, the stone lanterns and the trees are well sprinkled with water, moss and lichens are shining with a fresh verdure; not a twig, not a leaf have I left on the ground"

"Young fool," chided the tea master, "that is not the way a garden path should be swept. "Saying this, Rikyu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikvu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also.

Once you spend enough time in either of these domains, you also start seeing a world that feels like a secret place that most others don’t experience. I’ll admit that I scrutinize a restaurant’s choice in foliage a little more than I should — what plants they have, where they are, and whether they look healthy. Similarly, I can’t help but notice whether any care has been taken with the menu’s typography and the interior design decisions. I fully recognize how ridiculous this is, but I still find myself having to resist those details from coloring my overall experience.

There is an affinity with certain planned “landscapes” of the natural world – namely, the classic Italian Baroque garden. In the sample plans the Schnelle brothers devised, the arrangement of desks seems utterly chaotic, totally unplanned – a mess, like a forest of refrigerator magnets. But, as with the seemingly “wild” overgrowth of a “natural” garden, the office landscape is more thoroughly planned than any symmetrical and orderly arrangement of desks. Imaginary lines wend their way around every cluster, delineating common pools of activity; between and through the undergrowth of clusters are invisible, sinuous paths of work flow.

Ambient radio for rest, calm, or focus.

Some of this is nostalgia for our younger years...but some of this is certainly based in the feeling that the web was just better back then.

...The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

When I envision the web, I picture an infinite expanse of empty space that stretches as far as the eye can see. It's full of fertile soil, but no seeds have taken root. That is, except for about an acre of it.

Because “Inventing” is the precise word, for, as Brosterman elaborates, it’s not as though kindergarten always existed. It had to be invented and it even had an inventor. For most of European history, no one had bothered educating children before the age of seven, as it wasn’t until around that age that one might be confident they would survive into adulthood, so why bother? By the 1830s, however, it was becoming clear that if kids had made it to age four, they’d likely make it altogether; and this realization had a catalyzing effect on one German educator in particular, a charismatic crystallographer, of all things (and how often does one get to use those two words in one phrase?), named Friedrich Froebel.

Over the next several decades (through his death in 1852), Froebel elaborated an ever more specific theory and practice for the deployment of kindergartens (his term), small schools for children starting around age four, in which the kindergartners were the teachers—the gardeners of children—and the gardening took the form of guided free play: no tests, no drills, no grades, not even any reading, ‘riting, or ‘rithmetic. Just patterns and patternings (remember, Froebel started out as a crystallographer): a sequential exposition of and exposure to form and the formful.

I enjoy gardening the most when it aligns with my broader philosophy of life, so I thought readers might like to see that philosophy and see how I apply it to gardening. These principles are in random order, just as they are applied in life. Sometimes my focus is on having fun, other times I'm focused on planning, still other times I just want to kick back and chat to my friends and neighbours.

Introduction / Pareto principle / Balance / Fun / Working for happiness / Family / Purpose / Order / Planning / Flexibility / Variety / Strategic Resilience / Motivation / Sustainability / Invest to save / Kaizen / Kindness / Giving back / Experimentation / Learning

Conceptually speaking, architects have come a long way: from the house as a machine, to the house as a machine in the garden, to the garden as a machine for living in, now scaled to the entire planet itself. But considering the current state of the environment, our terrestrial habitat is in need of repair at all scales. Affirming what should be obvious, the obligation to steward our habitat should become all the more binding. Though written some decades ago, Siza’s short reflection on a house’s need for care bears particularly heavily on our ill-fitted relationship to the built and natural environment today, that is, on our relationship to the world we have made and the world we inhabit. It is this relationship itself that is long in need of repair and, though widely acknowledged, that is not being tended to as one would a home.

The Mughuls of India developed a tradition where each ruler commissioned his own garden. Then, "At the owner's death the pavilion, generally placed in the center of the site, became the mausoleum, and the whole complex passed into the care of holy men."

Problem

A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.

Solution

Grow grasses, mosses, bushes, flowers, and trees in a way which comes close to the way that they occur in nature: intermingled, without barriers between them, without bare earth, without formal flower beds, and with all the boundaries and edges made in rough stone and brick and wood which become a part of the natural growth.

I've written over 3,000 blog posts throughout the years. This blog has become a repository of my thoughts, feelings, experiments, hopes, and creations.

It has also become outdated, buggy, and suffers from link-rot.

So, every day, I tend to my digital garden.

...Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-long-dead link. And sometimes it is sad - seeing how much or how little the world has changed.

But, mostly, it is meditative. We do our best to fight against decay, but entropy always wins in the end. Every link eventually withers and every truth is eroded by time. Nevertheless, we continue.

An open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I'm currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.

I sometimes like to use the term "weave the web" to describe people who publish on their personal website. While web-themed, "weave the web" speaks only to one aspect of the web: its interconnectivity. Internet gardening evokes thoughts of the other side of the web: where you are on your own land, cultivating the thoughts on your mind. Letting ideas grow.

In conventional agriculture, vegetation is kept at the weed or herb level using energy to keep it cut, weeded, tilled, fetilised, and even burnt; that is, we are constantly setting the system back and incurring work and energy-costs when we stop natural succession from occurring.

Instead of fighting this process, we can direct and accelerate it to build our own climax species in a shorter time.

There is no attempt to form the garden into strict neat rows; it is a riot of shrubs, vines, garden beds, flowers, herbs, a few small trees, and even a small pond. Paths are sinuous, and garden beds might be round, key-holed, raised, spiraled, or sunken.

Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient and energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that, for instance, kitchen wastes are recycles to compost; animal manures are directed to biogas production or to the soil; household greywater flows to the garden; green manures are turned into the earth; leaves are raked up around trees as mulch.

To the observer, this may seem like a very unordered and untidy system; however, we should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness separates species and creates work, whereas order integrates, reducing work and discouraging insect attack. European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy.

Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.

...wherein is fully handled all that relates to fine gardens, commonly called pleasure-gardens, as parterres, groves, bowling-greens etc., together with remarks and general rules in all that concerns the art of gardening.

This is, I find, very cool.

Internet gardening evokes thoughts of the other side of the web: where you are on your own land, cultivating the thoughts on your mind. Letting ideas grow.

I like this metaphor [from James G] for personal websites and not just “digital gardens” because there are so many styles* and approaches to gardening, and everyone’s working with different constraints of weather and water and soil. I feel like we’ve gone through the formal garden equivalent of personal websites in the form of lookalike portfolio websites, and now we’re ready for the more naturalistic Piet Oudalf style (my aesthetic preference 😉).

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. ...No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”

---

[Rewilding is] a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command and control.

If the web is now a metaphorical barren wasteland, pillaged by commercial interests and growth-at-all-costs management consultants, then I’m all the more motivated to keep my little patch of land lush, and green, and filled with rainbow flowers.

So, feel free to stop by any time and stay as long as you like. I won’t track you, make you look at ads, ask you to download my app, harass you with popups, suggest you sign up for my newsletter or push you through a sales funnel. Enjoy the garden, and the peace 💐.

And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden.  One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.

What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

Gardeners, are, by their nature, people who believe in regeneration. They understand that the broken world we inherit can also be amended, with compost, worms, and steady tending. They have seen that the tended earth, in turn, offers up radical abundance—not only of food, but of insects, birds, rhizomes, and soil.

...Of course, any garden plot is small compared to the brokenness of a wider world that can seem beyond mending...Yet sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth—hummingbird and mockingbird, snail and earthworm—can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination. They can reconnect us—if just for a moment—with the life-energy we need to go on. Gardens also remind us that repair need not be so far off: in daily ways, we can each build our lives toward greater diversity and abundance. Nobody needs to be hungry. When we work the right way, we can all be fed.

I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it. 

But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

In many ways, we have outsourced the curation of our information diets to distant platforms unaligned with our interests. Reclaiming even partial agency in navigating knowledge networks is an act of self-care. Setting up our own RSS feeds, linking out to personal sites, elevating voices that inspire - these actions are the basis of a healthy information democracy. One that is defined by thoughtful pruning, editing and contextualising via trusted guides, not by endless generation,

In every garden, seasons of growth require seasons of care - cultivating, pruning, and even fallow periods to replenish the soil. May we embrace this fertility cycle of information - rather than seek to dominate and control it.

It’s interesting how we’re using the same metaphor—the garden—to describe two completely different things. [The walled garden] is the embodiment of the capitalist mindset applied to the digital ecosystem driven by greed. The [digital garden] is the digital manifestation of personal expression. Digital gardens are—or at least should be—a welcoming place.

But they should not be a destination. The point of a garden is to walk through it, to enjoy what it has to offer, and to then keep moving while carrying its beauty with you. Ideally, you should come out of that walk enriched, and not enraged.

They worked with Studio Mumbai, headed by Bijoy Jain; the first project Jain's worked on outside of India. The whole complex has a between-worlds feel — Japanese garden mixed with an almost (again!) Floridian super-high-end-motel vibrato, since there are no interior corridors. Lots of element exposure. But — you slide open one of the beautiful wood doors and the rooms reveal themselves each as sumptuous feats of texture and color.

The countertops in the cafe / bar are washi paper urushi laquered. It looks almost like leather from afar. The floors are the work of craftspeople — sakan plaster with kakiotoshi-style finishing. It’s a mix of dirt and cement and rock. For the first few months it sheds itself, and then hardens into an elegant, organic texture. It almost looks like you’re not supposed to walk upon it.

In the first year, a perennial will focus on its foundation, anchoring its roots, so it can survive dormancy in the winter.

The second year, the plant comes out of dormancy and starts to grow, both up and down — “you can expect to see blooms, though the plant hasn’t quite reached its full size or full flowering potential.”

In the third year, the plant takes off and comes into full form.

Another gardening metaphor we can use for creative work!

So many of my projects tend to follow this sleep, creep, leap structure.

‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk.

‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’

Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our garden.’

In the West the display of flowers seems to be a part of the pageantry of wealth—the fancy of a moment. Whither do they all go, these flowers, when the revelry is over? Nothing is more pitiful than to see a faded flower remorselessly flung upon a dung heap.

...Much may be said in favor of him who cultivates plants. The man of the pot is far more humane than he of the scissors.

...Anyone acquainted with the ways of our tea and Flower Masters must have noticed the religious veneration with which they regard flowers. They do not cull at random, but carefully select each branch or spray with an eye to the artistic composition they have in mind. They would be ashamed should they chance to cut more than were absolutely necessary. It may be remarked in this connection that they always associate the leaves, if there be any, with the flower, for their object is to present the whole beauty of plant life. In this respect, as in many others, their method differs from that pursued in Western countries. Here we are apt to see only the flower stems, heads as it were, without body, stuck promiscuously into a vase.

Like a forest or a garden or a field, an honest page of letters can absorb – and will repay – all the attention it is given. Much type now, however, is delivered to computer screens. It is a good deal harder to make text truly legible on screen than to render streaming video. Both fine technology and great restraint are required to make the screen as restful to the eyes as ordinary paper.

The underlying problem is that the screen mimics the sky instead of the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision – like the petals of a flower, or the face of a thinking animal, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or in magnified small bits, like astronomers studying details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for the open storage of pulverized information – names, dates, or library call numbers, for instance – but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

With living, though unconscious, matter, the creator must still adapt the work to the material, though here he experiences something that can without undue anthropomorphism be called a “response”; plants “respond” to cultivation and cross-fertilization in a sense rather different from that in which iron may be said to “respond” to hammering.

Pattern 7.7 – There is also one garden, so secret, that it does not appear on any map. The importance of the pattern is that it must never be publicly announced, and must not be in site plan. Except for a few, nobody should be able to find it.