A piece of milled plexiglass acting as a projecting lens; via the Computer Graphics and Geometry Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
New milling techniques applied to glass and plexiglass panels could be used to “create windows that are also cryptic projectors, summoning ghostly images from sunlight.”
[Pauly and Bompas] hope that the technique will be used in architectural design, to create windows that mould sunlight and throw images or patterns onto walls or floors,” which, if timed, milled, and manipulated just right, could produce a slowly animated sequence of images being projected by an otherwise empty window during different times of day.
I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded.
I submit that the materials that form the precursors to a product’s implementation have considerable value on their own.
My vision is that I will be able to ask a question as mundane as one about the wording of a single button, and trace the answer all the way back to the overarching business strategy to see that it makes sense.
It isn’t a site, or a service, or even an identifiable product at all, but rather a system for creating a skin around and connective tissue between things like:
Demographic studies
Contextual inquiries
Stakeholder and user interviews
Surveys
The business ecosystem
Personas
Scenarios
Sketches, storyboards, wireframes
Mockups, models and prototypes
Email and IM conversations
Meeting notes
Content inventories and audits
Concept schemes, taxonomies, thesauri
A UI style guide
A branding and visual identity guide
A voice and tone guide
A code style guide
...etc
The individual elements of such a corpus represent the work of half a dozen specialist sub-disciplines, and are useful for realizing a product’s implementation. But if you hook them all up together, they merge to become a strategic artifact that transcends products and operates as a critical control surface for the business. This is because what such an artifact represents is a coral reef of deeply-considered and hard-fought decisions, and a story of the process that yielded them.