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Mind Blend Cafe is my digital garden inspired by cozy coffeeshops to explore, connect, and evolve ideas into insights. My intention with this site is to host my thoughts-in-progress, share knowledge and wisdom I acquire, and eventually provide a calm, collaborative space to evolve ideas.
Background
Can the internet feel good? As digital technologies become integrated in almost every aspect of our lives, there is an interesting trend of rising exhaustion and anxiety. Many are finding refuge by disconnecting, returning to unplugged spaces like private journals or a “cabin in the woods” approach to escape from apps and technologies intended to boost productivity and connection.
Mind Blend is my digital space to imagine an alternate experience of the internet to explore, connect, and evolve. One that is calm, kind, fun, and evokes awe and inspiration. It is modeled after a community of people curating "digital gardens" and "cozy internet" corners as public digital spaces to think, reflect, and grow as a response to the chaotic stressful nature of the web.
With some development, Mind Blend will also be an invitation to others to join me in my cozy "digital thought cafe" to blend thoughts, feelings, ideas, and experiences to extract meaningful insights. My vision is that people start with a topic or question and feel encouraged to brain dump all their thoughts in a mindmap-like environment. Once they share their thoughts, they may look at others’ mind maps and make new connections to their own. They can go through this process as many times as they please but at the end, are asked to extract insights and make a "brew" of their ideas. The format of the ideas is open, and includes text, images, videos, gifs, and so on.
Mock-ups / Back-story
I wanted to create a digital presence for myself both personally and professionally but I had stalled in the recent years due to perfectionism & procrastination. The furthest development I did was pull together a Google Sites design.
In March, I was thinking about how to combine all the following ideas:
How much I love coffee shops/cafés and dreamily thinking of opening my own someday
How my favorite way to work was pretending I was in a coffee shop by putting on YouTube ambience videos and my favorite music
How I could continue having mind blowing conversations about design, ethics, and technology
How I felt so grateful to study cognitive science
How excited I felt after having discussions with people from all different backgrounds and experiences that connected in unexpected ways
Using Google Sites for a static page mock-up
After trying to think of some names, I came up with my favorite: Mind Blend. I felt it captured the image of different ideas from different people coming together to develop a new insight – with a coffeeshop tone!
As the Art & Web class project neared, I decided I would make my vision for Mind Blend clearer and use the skills from the class to, at the very least, create a static home page.
I knew I wanted to make Mind Blend a collaborate space but was struggling to think about how to make it novel yet functional (and feasible in a month-ish timeline).
At first, I was very interested in figuring out how to create a digital experience of people chatting in a coffeeshop about cool ideas. I thought about:
What the graphic design might look like
How to encourage engagement and limit distractions
How to facilitate a collaborative, brainstorming like experience
Sketching out a collaborative coffeeshop idea jamming experience
Wireframe of collaborate coffeeshop jam
However, I struggled to come up with a reason why people would use Mind Blend over existing software and why it would be a helpful collaboration tool.
I also realized wasn’t clear on the purpose of Mind Blend. I was getting confused between my desire to build a professional digital identity and my desire to encourage an imperfect, collaborative space for interdisciplinary conversations on topics related to cognitive science. After thinking about why existing tools weren’t right for the style of collaboration I wanted, I realized what I was really looking for was collaborative mind maps.
I found a tool called Kinopio that inspired the architecture of flow I wanted to create. While Kinopio hasn’t been implemented yet, it led me into a wonderful rabbit hole of digital gardens and “cozy web” which people were using as public learning spaces. It captured the exact essence of what I was trying to accomplish with Mind Blend.
With less than two weeks left, I decided for the purposes of this class to focus on prioritizing starting my own digital garden themed as a cozy coffee shop.
Sketching out mind map like idea connections
Sketching version 1 of Mind Blend Cafe's components
Wireframe of version 1 of Mind Blend Cafe's components
Right now Mind Blend Café is up and running. I’ve been making daily edits to it and building out the different pages which I wouldn’t have been able to do without this class!!
The next major development I want to focus on will be the collaborative brainstorming experience!
Screenshot of Mind Blend Cafe's first iteration
Page updated
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