Before I ever set foot on Kiriwina, I thought I understood display. I had spent a decade designing interfaces — dashboards, feeds, admin panels — built around the assumption that users want things tucked away until needed. Then I watched a Trobriand kinship group raise their bwema and realized I had been building tombs when I should have been building stages.
Display Is the Product
The bwema is architecture as argument. Slatted walls let passers-by see the harvest inside — enormous ceremonial yams stacked in careful rows. Painted panels in vermilion, white, and black face the village path. There is no backstage. The showing is the point. A yam house that hid its contents would be a warehouse, not a monument.
I returned to Melbourne and redesigned our overview page. We removed three layers of navigation and put the data first, organized but unhidden. Adoption doubled in six weeks. Your stack is your statement. Make it visible.