Pruning the Digital Garden

Over the course of a few months, my work for a seminar on design research took me on a meandering exploration through paper destruction methods, idiosyncratic post-it note placements, my first use of the OpenAI API, and countless Figma prototypes in what would eventually make sense as an interrogation of popular understandings of “tools for thought” and digital gardening practices.

Through a handful of branching mini-projects, including prototypes of browser-native LLM features and interactive thought canvases, I make the case that transcience and spontaneity are under-explored in contemporary software, which optimizes (often unnecessarily) for long-term retention.

If this seems at all interesting, take a look at the recording of my live presentation, in which I step through some of the projects and their inspirations.