About Angie Bowen
The year is 1999, and I'm happily clicking away on a behemoth of a beige box desktop computer. I'm carefully linking HTML pages together, forming a complex and intricate choose-your-own-adventure story. Click here to go deeper into the woods. Click here to rest in the abandoned cabin. Each choice leads to another branching path through my hypertext narrative labyrinth.
I didn't know it then, but I was creating the first vestiges of what would become my life's work more than two decades later (more on that in a minute).
Back then, the web was an experimental wild west. Website aesthetics were limited only to their creator's imagination. We had dancing gifs and psychedelic light shows. We had hot pink text on a yellow background that burned your eyes out of your head. And we had iframes, nested in tables meant for text, that we slotted sliced up images around to create a dollhouse for our pixel art. Yes, that last one was also me.
But then everything changed. It started with the homogenized aesthetic of chronological blogs. Then social media stole any originality that remained and bound our attention to the mighty algorithm.
Many of us would love to get back to our hypertext roots. And that's exactly what digital gardens allow us to do.
It's also a solution to a problem I discovered only months after I finished my psychology degree.
Most of us graduate knowing how to critically dissect an idea, but not how to creatively construct one.
When I stumbled across the concept of digital gardens in 2020, I began creating one as a pandemic project, something to tinker with to pass the time. Before I knew it, I was experiencing some amazing side effects.
My curiosity and motivation began to return after experiencing total burnout. I started noticing patterns and connections without even trying. My mindset was slowly shifting away from the anxious perfectionism of academia, into a more relaxed & creative state of being. One that felt joyful and freeing. One that was changing the way I think, learn, and create.
That experience inspired my mission to develop and share methods that help people think more creatively. With first-year university students through my capstone project, and with anyone who needs it through my field notes website and newsletter.
I'm Angie Bowen, a graduate student and visual artist developing systems for creative thinking. Welcome to my own public digital garden.
My work sits at the crossroads of cognitive psychology, learning sciences, communication theory, and creativity research.
Psychology (B.A.)
Studied how people think and learn. Realized I want to teach metacognition and metalearning.
Communication (M.A.)
Currently pursuing. Learning how to effectively communicate this knowledge to others in an educational capacity.
For my capstone project, I'm building a course on creative thinking for first-year university students. I'll be documenting the entire process here over the next two years as one of my pillars.