- Rigid design discourages irregularity; everything in rigid design should be, work, and behave exactly as expected. - But **irregularity can enhance experience**. Digital gardens combine regularity and irregularity. - For example, a garden might be full of flowers, but the flowers might be unique in type, color, or fragrance; the garden might include a tree or pond or garden gnome; no two gardens will be identical, even if you try to make them so. - You still recognize it as a garden, even with irregularities. - And intentional irregularities help us *expect the unexpected*. It allows serendipitous discovery. It's a more interesting, fulfilling experience to walk through a garden than it is to walk through a cookie-cutter cul-de-sac of uniform houses. - Going through the [[Bernstein, Mark. 'Hypertext Gardens'. 1998.|Hypertext Gardens]] essay, it felt like a world of content was unfolding as I discovered it. It’s like the web equivalent of something like [[House of Leaves]] — the way you *navigate* the material becomes part of the story. Thinsg like [[{6.6} reader-generated essays as a use-case for AI]] could take this to a more literal level. - I’ve thought about some of this before when I wrote that [[{2.2a} digital gardens are a protest against homogeneity on the open web]].