UX Camp Winter 2024
It Really is a Series of Tubes: UX and an Archaeology of the Internet
Almost all of our networked devices rely on a series of fewer than 500 fiber optic cables at the bottom of the sea. And, like all infrastructures, they’re simultaneously mundane artifacts and wonders of human achievement. If you’ve encountered these subsea cables, it might have been as a news story about breakage, or they were represented by an abstract map of connecting lines.
What happens when we try to understand something as invisible as “data” and as sprawling as the subsea cable network—and what does that have to do with designing stuff for screens?
Join us for a talk that weaves together UX and contemporary archaeology, to expose more of the real, human (often very analog) work that goes into making digital things go, from the pixels all the way to the pipes.
You won’t get a tidy new method to try right away. You’ll get a messy-by-design picture of what it can look like to think like an archaeologist about the things all around us—using a subsea cable research project as an example—and a dose of encouragement to sit with uncertainty and chaos for a little longer than is comfortable.
