Around three years ago, my friend Édouard and I were working on an idea. We saw a cohort of self-initiated learning groups around us, found this an inspiring and important way to work and socialize, and wanted to support this form by providing resources and connecting people together. At the time we called this idea "Sunday School" but a brainstorming session at a café in late-Summer 2016 had us renaming as "Learning Gardens."
Learning Gardens has since become a loose collection of people, projects, spin-offs, and, somehow, part of the landscape of design-oriented online social groups. It has also become an email address, a Slack group, a chain of quasi-related events. It has grown unanticipated tendrils, blossomed into wonderful connections, and nurtured chance assemblages of people who wandered into the same space.
The crux of Learning Gardens has always been embedded in the name. Gardening is ripe with connotations—the gardener's presence, expectations of work and results, patience for slow growth, getting ones hands dirty, and chance cross-species encounters (intentionally or otherwise). Gardening as a metaphor is powerful today because it is a well-known and physical entity, helping ground digital, political, social, ephemeral, and more generally abstract working that has become so primal to the 21st century.
Gardening, in the "community garden" sense more than the "jardin à la française," encourages collective resources, shared space, shared outputs, a maintenance-oriented practice, and a little bit of chaos. Gardens are not hard-walled (this would make them greenhouses), but they are separated from "nature" in as much as they are managed and curated towards a vision, however loose that is.
We've always treaded carefully around how to define Learning Gardens. LG has been, for us, and hopefully others, a living and dynamic exploration of particular conditions, a shell to incubate growth, a container of language and dispositions. I prefer Learning Gardens be thought of as a substrate for growing a social space for learning (growing / making / exploring) together rather than any particular entity. It is too bad, perhaps, that the name is a noun, when I think we are more interested in it being an aura around a type of action, or a verb.
Or, to quote Ian Hamilton Finlay, "a garden is not an object but a process".
(I recommend this essay on Finlay's gardening as poetry practice.)
Under sunshine,
Lukas
Learning Gardens has since become a loose collection of people, projects, spin-offs, and, somehow, part of the landscape of design-oriented online social groups. It has also become an email address, a Slack group, a chain of quasi-related events. It has grown unanticipated tendrils, blossomed into wonderful connections, and nurtured chance assemblages of people who wandered into the same space.
The crux of Learning Gardens has always been embedded in the name. Gardening is ripe with connotations—the gardener's presence, expectations of work and results, patience for slow growth, getting ones hands dirty, and chance cross-species encounters (intentionally or otherwise). Gardening as a metaphor is powerful today because it is a well-known and physical entity, helping ground digital, political, social, ephemeral, and more generally abstract working that has become so primal to the 21st century.
Gardening, in the "community garden" sense more than the "jardin à la française," encourages collective resources, shared space, shared outputs, a maintenance-oriented practice, and a little bit of chaos. Gardens are not hard-walled (this would make them greenhouses), but they are separated from "nature" in as much as they are managed and curated towards a vision, however loose that is.
We've always treaded carefully around how to define Learning Gardens. LG has been, for us, and hopefully others, a living and dynamic exploration of particular conditions, a shell to incubate growth, a container of language and dispositions. I prefer Learning Gardens be thought of as a substrate for growing a social space for learning (growing / making / exploring) together rather than any particular entity. It is too bad, perhaps, that the name is a noun, when I think we are more interested in it being an aura around a type of action, or a verb.
Or, to quote Ian Hamilton Finlay, "a garden is not an object but a process".
(I recommend this essay on Finlay's gardening as poetry practice.)
Under sunshine,
Lukas