Mind Blend Cafe - The Backstory 🪴
Gather round for here is the story of Mind Blend Cafe!!
One of my goals had been to build a digital presence for myself both personally and professional but I had stalled due to perfectionism and procrastination.
In March, I dreamily journaled what I would do with a million dollars and found myself wanting to open up a cozy coffeeshop designed to promote collaboration in creative ways - specifically in topics related to cognitive science. I was reminded of the French philosophers like Simone de Bouvier or Sartre having lengthy conversations about ideas in coffee shop like environments. A thought cafe! It was the perfect combination of all my favorite things:
- Coffee shops/cafes
- Mind blowing conversations about design, ethics, and technology
- Cognitive science
- Connecting seemingly unrelated ideas and experiences together in unexpected ways
Revisiting former journals, I realized I had made an attempt at something similar back in June 2020 - Mind, Brain, Culture Club… However, we didn’t get further than a Google drive!
After a couple days, the name Mind Blend clicked for me and I was in love. I felt it captured the image of different ideas from different people coming together to develop new insights - with a coffeeshop tone!
In parallel, I was also thinking about my identity as a designer and someone headed into the field of UX/HCI in responsible tech. The questions I found myself most interested in centered on choice/autonomy, trust, lo-fi tech, effect of technologies on our brains, and ontology.
I wanted to combine the cozy coffee shop vibe with these questions I was interested in. After some iterations of designing a cafe like environment digitally and ways to promote engaged collaboration and idea evolution, I stumbled upon a community of people curating digital gardens.
Digital gardens appeared to be a safe place for people to nurture thoughts and grow ideas. It captured the essence of what I wanted to do with my personal digital presence and how I wanted to design a digital safe, collaborative public space. Mind Blend Cafe is my cozy thought cafe modeled after digital gardens to explore, connect, and evolve ideas into insights.
In future versions of Mind Blend Cafe, I hope to design & implement a collaborative experience to collectively contribute to ideas and discover new insights!!