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 warm-up for a designer. It’s part storytelling, part science, part detective work, part art, part proselytizing, and part ally-building. And it’s damn hard, especially when you have to do it all hundreds of feet underwater against a current and surrounded by sharks and algae blooms.
It’s also repetitive, back-breaking work. The lure of design often takes the form of high ideals and promise, but much of the actual work is unglamorous. Moving pixels around on a bright screen for hours on end and asking the same question of users and systems over and over again can all take their toll.
In the circles of archaeology, field school is the crucible that weeds out the people who are serious enough to pursue it as a way of life versus those who just enjoyed watching Indiana Jones. It is a subset of education where you go on an actual dig to find out if you can keep your wits about you after spending ten hours in the blinding sun digging perfectly square holes. If you make it, you are assumed to be in possession of great determination, an indifference to personal discomfort, and lacking more than a little in common sense — all of which make you the perfect candidate for an archaeologist.
Design may not have a tradition of field schools (although a compelling case could be made for freelancing as field school), but it has similar aims. Design is about excavating a product, person or organization and then sharing your findings with the world in an honest and compelling way. You must sift through a massive amount of information to find the one or two things that really matter. You have to figure out how to inspire people.
Provenience
If I could ask other designers to think about just one thing that they could learn from archaeologists, it would be the concept of provenience. Technically, the term means, “The in situ location at the date of discovery.” But to archaeologists, it connotes much more. It means that the place, the time, and the condition that you discover things affects how you interpret them. It means that the way we discover things can sometimes mean even more that what we find.
As designers, we already understand this to be true. It’s the reason we come up with user stories, with interaction flows, with case studies. But this knife cuts both ways, and we often turn a blind eye to our own biases.
How does our background, our frame of mind, the time of day affect the solutions we come up with to design problems? If we had come across this same problem ten months ago instead of today, how might we have approached it differently? And how might we design things differently if we were richer, or happier, or brokenhearted?
Or archaeologists?