From Archaeology to Product Design

Most people I know think Archaeology is digging up dinosaurs (that’s palaeontology) or Roman mosaics with a brush.

In the second case, archaeology isn’t just that. That may even be the least of it. Archaeology is knowing how to interpret social systems from the scarce remains that have survived down to us.

It’s learning to see the whole from the parts. It’s a scientific and analytical process, but it also calls for a creative dimension. Good archaeology and good anthropology, by the way, are ultimately that balanced combination of science and creativity.

When a tourist visits an archaeological site, all they see is small remnants of walls, narrow streets and curious objects. An archaeologist sees the whole house — its walls standing, its roof, how the objects were arranged and how the people living there interacted with them.

They know because they’ve worked with those materials, because they know parallels from other similar sites or parallels from other cultures with very similar houses and ways of life. What’s in front of them is still the same four stones and three pots, but what they see is a complete system.

Designing a digital product is more like this than it seems. If you understand the product holistically, as a system and not as an interface, the working method is practically the same. The key difference is that:

Archaeology reconstructs the most logical past and product design tries to build the most logical future

Where the archaeologist has four stones, a designer has four screens, a half-formed idea or a team with a hunch. Where the archaeologist rebuilds the walls and the roof, a designer rebuilds the technical infrastructure that will hold the product up. Where the archaeologist infers how the family lived inside the house and the village, a designer imagines how the user is going to behave inside the flow and the ecosystem. Where the archaeologist looks for parallels in neighbouring sites to understand what was normal at the time, a designer looks for parallels in the market to understand which players are already operating, what dependencies exist and where the value is moving.

In both cases, the work is the same. Seeing the complete system from the pieces on the table.

Many people, including folks in senior roles or founders of tech companies, read an interface the way a tourist reads archaeological ruins. Many technical or business profiles can read the whole house, the technical and operational infrastructure. But a good Product Strategist or Product Designer sees the system, the entire culture.

The most exciting point where product design departs from the archaeological method is that designing a digital product means creating an organic, scalable network of economic incentives among all the actors it involves.

Designing a digital product is not designing an isolated tool. The product itself is just one more gear inside a network of actors it integrates and interacts with.

When someone hires me to design product, this is what comes in with me. The archaeological eye to read the system, and the product eye to build that foundation of incentives among everyone involved.