concept visualization - take three

I've often been praising the strength of visualization techniques to define, communicate, and refine technology and business concepts. As Adam Greenfield points out in Everyware, a good example how powerful a tool concept visualization can be is the development of Raytheon's Common Tactical Blackboard for the US military after seeing the animation of John Underkoffler's original concept in Minority Report (see e.g. demo at CeBIT '08, Jeff Han's presentation, and Microsoft's vision demo).

Addition (Nov '08):
Another neat example on the art of concept visualization is The ambient life by Buro Knapzak. (though the story line is unfortunately not very original) .

concept visualization XXL

Opinions seem to be divided on this one (see e.g. Kara Swisher's note), but I'm absolutely in love with Scott McCloud's visualization of Google Chrome (then again I have always been a fan of BD's, i.e. Franco-Belgian comic strips ;-).

Of course in this instance the strip was created after the fact and is used mainly as communication & marketing tool. But in my experience these type of visualization lend themselves excellently for testing & refinement of user experience concepts before any detailed design or coding has taken place.

(retro) show & tell

Yesterday evening's UX Cocktail hour took place at the beautiful offices of chunkid in Amsterdam: An interesting and very well attended show & tell session. Amongst others, we saw some neat timeline examples, Jacco shared some rather complex process flow models for the Dutch government, and Martijn talked about a recent project at Satama and the success they had defining a library of standard components and templates together with the developers.

My own modest contribution was an example of storytelling / concept visualization in true retro style; a wireless portal concept animation completed by Nortel's former UX group Design Interpretive almost a decade ago. Some aspects seem rather funny in hindsight, but it is quite amazing how many of these predictions were spot on, and how many are just now starting to be deployed! (Then again, we were an amazing team of extraordinarily creative and talented people, ey ;-).