# Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardening  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Informed Life]] - Full Title: Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardening - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/dee3317f-5ffd-4f39-a3a1-7ee2b6958b58 ## Highlights - Use Physical Metaphors to Communicate and Understand Abstract Concepts Summary: Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is a book that had a profound impact on the author's identity. The concept of everything being metaphorical to some degree and grounded in embodiment became an obsession for the author. This understanding is especially relevant for those working in programming and digital design, where abstract ideas often lack a physical reality. The author's experience in illustration and designing digital products involved intentionally crafting concrete representations of abstract concepts. Transcript: Speaker 1 I first read metaphors we live by by George Lakeoff and Mark Johnson which is probably one of my canonical books that defined my identity or something. I even like my mother studied metaphors in her thesis and kind of passed it on to me. It was very much an inherited thing. I kind of become obsessed with this understanding of that everything we experience in the world is metaphorical to some degree, almost all that is based in embodiment. That's another one of my huge themes is like I'm a, I just keep going on about how everything relates to metaphors and embodiment. That our experience in the physical world is the basis of all our abstract understanding. So that is obviously incredibly relevant for people like us working in programming and digital design and knowledge management where we're trying to grapple with these big abstract Ideas and all this kind of like free floating digital stuff that sometimes doesn't feel very grounded in a physical reality. But our understanding of it always is so this carry through all the illustration work I did when I worked in like programming education, working on designing digital products, you're Obviously a very intentionally crafting metaphor, you're intentionally crafting concrete representations of abstract concepts. ([Time 0:04:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fa94c604-ac44-4dcc-b621-5429c573309c)) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Digital Gardening: Unpolished, Growing Knowledge Base of Connected Ideas Summary: Digital gardening involves creating non-chronological and deeply interlinked pages that are imperfect and grow slowly over time. Unlike traditional blogging where posts are standalone, in digital gardening, pages are continually updated with new ideas and insights. Rather than being completed once published, pages are marked as unfinished or in progress, encouraging revisits and updates as ideas evolve. This approach changes the way individuals interact with their personal website by fostering continual growth and evolution of content. Transcript: Speaker 1 That, yeah, it's non-chronological. All of the pages are deeply interlinked. And it's very imperfect and you grow it slowly over time. So in traditional blogging, you kind of put up a post and then you're kind of done, right? And the next day or the next week, you write a different post and put it up and it's done. With gardening, you kind of put up a page and you maybe just put a few bullet points or a few sentences, a few small snippets of something. And it's not done yet, right? You kind of, you can put a status on it, right? Like unfinished or like, you know, starting to grow. And then you revisit it later when you like update your ideas. You're like, oh, I've changed my mind about this or like, I only had a few bullet points before and now I have like, you know, two paragraphs to play about this topic and you update it. And so it's a very different understanding of how you're going to interact with this personal website, it's ([Time 0:12:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a92f3b86-f3d0-410b-a0fd-4696ba5f1c11)) - The Challenge of Designing Digital Gardens Summary: Designing digital gardens poses unsolved problems, especially in navigation and structure. Current digital gardens lack easy replication due to manual coding and lack of frameworks. Navigation within these gardens can lead to dead ends, necessitating global navigation structures and search options. The challenge lies in providing users with relevant and interconnected content in a natural order, which requires better information architecture patterns and design practices. Transcript: Speaker 1 That's interesting. That's a really good question because navigation and structure is kind of one of these design problems in digital gardens. I would say we haven't solved yet. I think there's a lot of unsolved problems in the kind of design of digital gardens. Like we can get into even infrastructure problems later that there aren't, it's not easy to build one of these. Mine is built by hand with a bunch of janky code and a hodgepodge over the years. Like it is not something I can just hand to someone else and have them spin up their own version of, which makes me really sad. I wish I was a better developer to be able to enable more people to build these. At the moment, we just don't have great frameworks or systems or principles for doing it. Navigation is definitely one of these problems in the problem you describe where you land on a single page. And usually what people do is they put back links somewhere either on a sidebar or below the post. And these are like pages that link to the page you're currently on. And that's really great. That gives you something else to click on next, right? You can kind of go click through and explore. But sometimes you kind of get stuck on a dead end page that aren't even expect to it. And that's when you need someone to be able to jump back out to some sort of global navigation structure, right? They need to go to some index page where they can see everything. And if someone has, you know, the thousand notes on a digital garden, you can't really browse an index page that well. So that's where you kind of have to rely on things like filters, searching, you know, all kind of typical design patterns we have for searching and browsing information on the web. I wish there were better information architecture patterns. Yeah, I think, again, I'm going to say this is like an unsolved problem at the moment, because the chronological stream gives you a very natural order of where to go next, right? You're just going to the next post, the next post. And the dream of digital gardens is that actually you should be seeing the most relevant next content every single time you're on a page, because everything is connected by content Type and relationships and themes and tags. But I think that there may be good examples of this being done on many digital gardens because we're missing that sort of emphasis, we're missing the infrastructure piece and we're Missing the kind of best design practices piece. ([Time 0:16:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/18f00492-2b81-4a13-87c4-3a1e7f97aab9)) - Effective Problem-Solving through Critical Thinking and Writing Summary: To be an effective problem-solver, whether in a job or any meaningful task, individuals should harness critical thinking skills. This involves evaluating past approaches, identifying key questions, acknowledging uncertainties, and assessing the strength of personal beliefs. Writing is highlighted as a pivotal tool in this process, enabling individuals to organize thoughts, pinpoint crucial questions, and attempt to answer them systematically. By capturing their current understanding and beliefs, individuals can enhance their ability to tackle complex issues and act effectively in the world. Transcript: Speaker 1 But if you have any job that isn't all what we would call knowledge work, which I assume is most people listening to a podcast called the informed life, to be honest, you need to be, you Need to have a set of beliefs and opinions, right? That you are bringing to every job you do. And not even necessarily a job, right? Anything where you're like, okay, I care about this, I want to work on it. And it's some like meaty programming or design problem that you really think is worth solving. That's really going to take some critical thinking, right? You're going to have to be like, okay, what's been done in the history of this? What questions should I be answering? What are my uncertainties? How sure are my beliefs? These are kind of like core pieces of critical thinking that we all have to do, right? If we're really going to be problem-solving in the world. And writing is one of the best ways to figure all these out and organize them and be like, okay, I have to actually identify what the critical questions are to answer. And then I have to write those questions down. And then I have to try to answer those questions, right? This is like a process. And I don't know about a process to go through then to simply write those all down and then try to answer them by writing stuff down. Obviously, you can use things like drawing and audio, like notes. And there's all sorts of workflow stuff you've been doing here. But you really want to be very explicitly capturing your current understanding of a situation and your current beliefs about it, to be an effective agent in the world. ([Time 0:34:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d085cb0f-3779-400d-a456-782e41ed832d)) ## New highlights added August 10, 2024 at 1:08 PM - Episode AI notes 1. Maggie Appleton emphasizes the importance of using physical metaphors to make abstract concepts more understandable, particularly in fields like programming and digital design. 2. She highlights the impact of the book 'Metaphors We Live By' on her perception of identity and the embodiment of ideas. 3. Digital gardening is described as a method of maintaining an interconnected, non-chronological knowledge base, which evolves over time through continual updates and insights. 4. Unlike traditional blogging, digital gardening encourages imperfection and growth, leading to a more dynamic interaction with personal content. 5. Appleton identifies challenges in designing digital gardens, such as navigation issues and the need for better information architecture to connect ideas. 6. The design of digital gardens currently lacks frameworks for easy replication, resulting in manual coding difficulties and potential dead ends in user navigation. 7. Critical thinking and writing are presented as essential skills for effective problem-solving, allowing individuals to clarify their thoughts and tackle complex issues successfully. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/episode-takeaways/105ad2b4-c632-4a78-aa06-04f8ac6d39e0))