Designing immersive media to protect cultural heritage

National Geographic magazine assigned me a cover story on Public Lands in 2016, specifically focused on the gutting (by 85%) of Bears Ears National Monument. It was story that, at its heart, was a quest to save a living museum - a landscape of over 100,000 sites of “archeological significance,” and all together one vast sacred site to the Indigenous communities in the region. This story needed more dimensions than a magazine could give, and more voices than the editorial structure could accommodate so I set about designing a way to add both. The project morphed and branched into several over the next years and resulted in a Webby Award winning VR experience (for Best Interactive Design), but also, and most importantly, for documentation and visualizations that helped restore the Monument boundaries and protect new areas in danger.