An Archive Built by Many Hands
Millie showed up to Hack Your Summer without a team and without knowing how to build a platform. She had an idea, though: a literary archive made of short portraits of ordinary people, written by the people who know them. A retired schoolteacher. A bodega owner. A bartender who remembers your order. She didn't know yet what form it would take, only that she wanted a way to preserve those kinds of stories.
She found Spencer, a recent UX design grad who was still hunting for a project of his own. A few days later, Deepi, an art history student with a strong instinct for how stories hold together structurally, joined too. None of them had worked together before.
The team came together the way most real projects do, through conversation, not assignment. Millie shaped the editorial voice and the submission process. Spencer turned it into an actual interface. Deepi thought about how the whole archive should function as a system, the kind of structural thinking her art history background was good for. Building from three different design vocabularies wasn't free. Handing off files between someone with a UX degree, a journalism/anthro major, and an art historian took some effort to sort out. But it also meant nobody had to bring everything themselves.
By the end of two weeks, they'd already shipped an MVP version of The Living Index, a website where anyone can submit a portrait of someone in their life, have it reviewed, and see it published to a permanent map. Along the way, the sharpest question they got wasn't about design. It was about who owns a portrait once someone else writes it. That's the kind of question a project only earns once it looks real, and the team took it seriously, folding it into how they thought about editorial review from then on.
The Living Index home page, where you can access the live archive.
Overnight, Millie didn't become a programmer, Spencer didn't become a journalist, and Deepi didn't become a UX designer. That was never the plan! But they built The Living Index anyway, together, with each doing the part only they could do.
The first portrait submitted by Millie on The Living Index, now available to read here.
Want to Get Involved?
If there's someone in your community whose story deserves to be remembered, a neighbor, coworker, family member, or familiar face from your block, The Living Index wants to hear about them. You don't need to be a writer. You just need to be someone who's paying attention. The site includes a simple submission template to help you get started.
The living Index is also looking for collaborators with experience in social media, storytelling and publishing, illustration and design, web or product development, and legal or consent advising. It's an early-stage project with plenty of opportunities to help shape what comes next, including future plans for audio storytelling.
To contribute, get in touch through The Living Index website or email Millie at emileepolzin@gmail.com. If you're an early-stage investor interested in supporting the project, she'd love to hear from you too.
The Living Index is open. Come share who matters to you.