Lauren Powell is a trained archaeologist from Cape Town, South Africa. She specialised in palaeoanthropology at the University of Cape Town and has been working to transfer her skills from academia into the world of design.
The Archaeologist Everyone Imagines
When I introduce myself as an archaeologist, I am usually imagined to be someone like Indiana Jones. Think tombs, treasures, dust, adventure, artefacts under layers of sand, and not to mention: Dinosaurs. Not many people can fully understand what archaeologists do and how these skills could be transferred into a world of design.
Archaeologists, by definition, collect and assess objects left behind by people and civilisations that have ceased to exist. Not unlike a detective of sorts, the objects are evidence. Evidence we use to interpret and uncover the mystery and stories of the people who left them behind. Just like a game of Cluedo, we already know that it’s the candlestick holder in the billiards room, but we aren’t too sure who committed the crime and, most importantly, why.
You see, the discipline of archaeology is not only about digging artefacts out of the ground – even though it’s my favourite part of the job. It’s about observing entire landscapes and environments, how humans interacted with those environments, the pattern recognition of human behaviour across cultures and time, systems thinking, and understanding how this all results in the objects we find.
We work on piecing together fragments to recreate a bigger story. The story of people. Every archaeological interpretation begins with incomplete information. Designing meaningful experiences starts the same way.
In between Academia and Design
There are many pillars that help make a meaningful social impact in the world; all of them are interconnected and important. There are pillars that observe and write research, others that try to affect policy, and then there are the pillars that reach the everyday person. After finishing one of my postgraduate degrees, I felt that I wanted to change my method of impact.
After studying how people of the past navigated, survived, and innovated in their environment, I wondered how I could reverse engineer the knowledge I collected to enact positive change for people living today. I loved learning about how people lived thousands of years ago, but I realised I wanted to influence how people think today.
And here’s the uncomfortable part. The honest and not so glamorous part of carving a path into a space that was never made for you. Since the age of 9, I was hell-bent on becoming some sort of fossil-hunter. I was dedicated to that path, streamlined, like a horse with blinkers. So, when it was time to pivot, I felt a little lost and doubtful.
Until one day, I sat down with a technologist, who pointed out the importance of needing cultural and historical context in every product we create. She explained it like fine-tuning a persona in a UX exercise, understanding the audience, their behaviours, and their habits through a far deeper lens.
That was the first thing I needed: someone to help me take my blinkers off and believe that transitioning these skills was viable. The second thing I needed was to convince other people that hiring an archaeologist outside of a heritage or academic space would be beneficial.
Instead of writing about behaviour, I wanted a chance to help create the conditions for reflection, curiosity, inspiration, and action. Changing people’s perspectives one experience at a time. So, I was given a space to change from academic writing to content development for multiple audiences, and I traded excavation sites for audience journeys. I didn’t necessarily leave archaeology; I simply changed the audience.
Discovering Experience Design
In some ways, archaeologists already think like designers. We start our work by assessing an object, then reconstructing the environment, behaviours, and human needs that shaped its design. Designers shape the environments and objects that impact our behaviour.
Where archaeologists investigate people, experience designers design for people. Where we interpret evidence, designers create evidence. And where we have been taught to build narratives, designers build user journeys.
Archaeologists and designers may start at opposite ends, but we essentially create or recreate the same journey of experience. While archaeologists work backwards in time assessing the outer effects of a ripple, designers have the responsibility of impacting the future by creating the beginning of the ripple itself.
Which Skills Go Where?
Curiosity. Observation. Context. Storytelling.
Curiosity: As archaeologists, we begin with asking questions. Rather than searching for quick answers, we learn to ask better and more precise questions. Every object, landscape, and layer of sand invites us to ask what happened, why it happened, and what it might have meant to the people who experienced it.
Design follows similar principles: before creating an experience, we first seek to understand the people we are designing for and what experience will resonate with them most.
Observation: Archaeology teaches us that even the smallest detail can reveal the biggest story. We learn to read landscapes, relationships, and subtle traces of human behaviour. In experience design, we observe how people behave within a space: where they stop, where they lose interest, what they touch, what they remember, and what they walk past. Those patterns tell us whether an experience is working.
Context: One of the most important things we learn when excavating is that as we dig up the soil to discover the fossil or artefact, we are destroying the very context that will help piece together the story. We must record and save samples of every 10cm of soil we dig up. All the soil we have dug up, besides the saved sample, gets sifted through a grid in case we missed smaller fossils.
Context helps us build the narrative; the artefact alone won’t tell us much. Experiences are no different. A beautifully designed exhibit can fail if it ignores the culture, history, or expectations of its audience.
Storytelling: People often imagine that archaeologists uncover stories buried in the ground. We don’t; we uncover fragments. The story only emerges through interpretation. We decide which pieces matter, how they connect, where uncertainty remains, and how to communicate those ideas in a way that others can understand.
Experience design begins in much the same way. Before a single graphic is designed or an interactive is built, we construct the narrative. We decide what journey the visitor should take, which ideas deserve emphasis, what questions should be asked, and how each moment contributes to the whole. The outcome may be different, but both disciplines begin by carefully crafting a story from evidence.
formula D_
formula D_ was not looking to hire an archaeologist; they were looking for creative ways to better understand people, experimenting with how to fine-tune the experiences they create for their audiences.
Every exhibition, museum, science centre or visitor experience begins with a simple question: “How do we help someone see the world differently?” and, strangely enough, that’s not so different from archaeology.
It takes a certain kind of creative confidence to recognise and value the expertise from an entirely different discipline, and bravery to cultivate it within a design environment.
Similarly, this is the same mindset that enables formula D_ to create meaningful experiences for diverse and international audiences: a mindset built on creative confidence and courage.
The team itself is multidisciplinary and dynamic, reflecting internally the very diversity it designs for externally. While human-centred design has become a familiar phrase in our industry, but I think we go a step further. We don’t simply design around people; we build human-centred systems that bring together different perspectives, disciplines, and ways of thinking to create experiences with lasting impact.
Although I spent most of this piece exacting the similarities between two disciplines, this story is not really about archaeology, and it’s not about me either. It’s about realising that the most valuable skills we develop are often not confined to the profession we first learnt them in.
We are very quick to define ourselves by our job titles or degrees, but I think our greatest value lies in the way we think. The future belongs to people who are willing to take expertise from one discipline and apply it somewhere entirely unexpected. Sometimes creativity isn’t just about making a beautiful image; it’s about taking a chance on hiring someone who may not come from the best-fit discipline.
We need more people carrying deep disciplines into unusual areas, like scientists working with artists, engineers working with educators, and anthropologists working with technologists. We need more businesses taking chances on the unusual candidates. Creating environments where vastly different disciplines collide is where innovation lives.
I may still call myself an archaeologist, but today my excavation site looks a little different. Instead of uncovering the stories people left behind, I help create experiences that encourage new stories to be told.
