Time is a wall we all know and we can never cross.
I grew up in New England, where stone walls appear in the middle of forests, built by hands that are gone, marking boundaries nobody remembers, standing in fields that became woods long before I was born. I used to trace them as a kid and wonder: how did this get here? What did this place look like when this wall meant something?
That question never left me. When I go back and visit, the walls are the first thing I see and I realized how much I've missed them.
I spent years thinking about questions like that. Backpacking and hitchhiking across countries and continents, searching for other ways to know the world, not as a tourist but as someone trying to get under the surface of places. I studied anthropology. I spent five years at Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum working on the sacred site of King Philip's War in Bristol, RI, where the ground held centuries of history that most people walked over without knowing. I spent three years working with a tribal nation in Massachusetts creating documentaries, attending powwows and funerals, being trusted with access to a culture that existed just beneath the surface of the world most people see. I was in the room when they received their federal recognition. It changed me.
Then I became a product designer. I went to RISD. I spent over a decade at a global professional association working at the intersection of learning, digital products, marketing, and partnerships — building things that help people understand the world more deeply, and learning how organizations grow from ideas into movements. That work and the people there taught me how to build, how to scale, and how to find the people who need what you've made.
Three years ago I had the idea for Misplaced Histories. The problem had been in me for decades, the feeling of standing somewhere and sensing there were layers I couldn't access. The strip mall that used to be a battlefield. The parking lot over someone's home. The road that follows a trail nobody remembers naming. The neighborhoods named for what they paved over. I knew what the app should feel like. I just couldn't build it yet.
When AI tools made it possible for someone like me to build something like this, I didn't hesitate. I spent six weeks building, iterating, and shipping, learning every piece of the technology by doing it, making every decision myself. The result is Misplaced Histories. An infinite wonder machine. A tool for anyone who has ever stood somewhere ordinary and felt the pull of something deeper.
This is the confluence of everything I've ever been interested in. The stone walls. The world I hitchhiked across. The sacred land I walked every day without fully understanding. The indigenous voices I was trusted to hear. The design work. The product thinking. The belief that technology should make the world feel bigger, not smaller.
I built this for the five-year-old playing on the stone wall that ran across my backyard. I built it for the commuter driving the same road every day without knowing what happened there. I built it for anyone who wants to see the world as it actually is — deeper, stranger, and more alive than the surface suggests.
— Sarah Philbrick, BFA, M.Ed
Founder, This Human Experience, LLC
Asheville, North Carolina