Excavating Design

“So what do you think they would want to save, right at the end when the whole thing was sinking?”

This was my favorite part. The part of my job where I had the chance to put myself in the place of the people we were studying, imagine their hopes and fears and secrets and build the clues out of dust and splinters.

We were high in the mountains of Colorado, standing at the edge of a small pond where a gold dredge had sunk nearly a hundred years ago. I was sweating, but I couldn’t tell how much of that was from the heat and how much had to do with the fact that we had just carried a few hundred pounds of SCUBA gear several miles into the forest.

Little did either of us realize it at the moment, but my mentor had just asked me the question that would send me on a wide arc — one that would eventually land me in the world of UX design.

Training

Archaeology, in my opinion, is the perfect...