An invitation to explore
Let us spend less time on commercialized platforms and more time exploring the forest that is the internet.
On November 28, 2021 I received a news alert that Virgil Abloh had died. I was crushed. Virgil was my Steve Jobs. I had listened to every lecture and interview, followed every project and experiment. Virgil inspired me to entwine my varied creative interests, such as visual art, prose and poetry, and design. After his death I swore I would remain committed to his values of acquiring strong fundamentals, remixing ideas from different genres, sharing your knowledge, remaining a student of design, and working hard because life is too short to waste.
Product design, and specifically software design, still feel so culturally narrow to me. Why don’t we steal ideas from other design disciplines? Or better yet, from anthropology, sociology, and behavior psychology? The tragic byproduct of this monotony is that most apps and websites look and feel the same nowadays. Over the decades, despite more people being online, websites have flattened and homogenized, thus narrowing diversity of thought. It makes me nostalgic for the early days of the internet, when there was no singular expectation of how a website should be! This allowed for variation in format and expression, which birthed new ideas.
So what if in 2023 we brought digital experimentation and variation back? Well, people are (example A, example B).
I for one am parched for new avenues on the internet, new ways of asking questions and fresh places to dig, which is why I am proverbially digging in Notion. I use Notion for digital gardening (i.e. a kind of anti-blog blog). What I find interesting is that the more I use Notion, the more creative I feel. Products like Instagram or Gmail drain me and strictly dictate what I can and cannot do, versus allowing me to explore and create freely, from scratch. It is this joy and balance that I feel while using Notion that shows me the value of craft. I invite you to join me this year in spending less time on commercialized platforms and more time exploring the forest that is the internet.
Thank you for writing this post, Aishwarya! :D
It really resonates with me.
One idea I and close friends (like Michelle Jia, of Sundogg substack fame) have been exploring is the paradigms we think within. Specifically, moving from one of mechanization/control to one of ecology/regeneration.
I think your neologism "digital gardening" is totally a shift in paradigm, not just approach! Love it.
As an information designer/dataviz engineer, one tool I've really liked is the Zettelkasten methodology (which Notion in many ways embraces). It's a different approach to creativity and idaes.
I'm also working on remaking my personal website as more of a "digital garden" of ideas, rather than just a boring linear layout (specifically, I'm trying to center it all around a network viz of all the ideas & making it feel like elements are tangible & alive, kind of like on Arc's landing page).
I'll definitely send the first evolution your way in case you ever have a moment to check it out!
Digital Gardening!! I like that new concept!! We reap what we sow, so one got to the careful!! On the topic of scratch, you can go to a new city and take a conducted tour or tour on your own. When you use conducted tour you are using Instagram, Gmail etc ... when you are your own you can make it more creative. Here we have to draw a line somewhere. There are people explore entire USA on foot, or bike if that is one extreme the other one is totally managed tour. In totally managed tour you are practically a prisoner on tour however in the other end all your energy will be spent on travel and self guiding. Whether you are cultivating art, literature or creative design like Newton said you have to stand on the shoulders of giants to some extent. While taking the essence of the past knowledge filter and discard the baggage it comes with. Then you are free to roam in the Digital Forest. It is like entering a secure building with Admin access badge.