Author: Behance Team / Source: 99U by Behance
Five designers reflect on creative prospects that could have been.
We all have brilliant ideas that never came to fruition: smart hacks and world-changing solutions that don’t make it out of the drawing board stage. Maybe the product was impossible to build.
Maybe you got distracted by a summer romance. Maybe your creative director killed it on arrival.So we asked five creatives to revisit their brilliant ideas that never came to be and judge whether they were genius or madness.
1. A digital bookmark for printed books:
Wai-Loong Lim, founder of Y Studios
I love reading, but I thought the traditional book experience could be even more enriching. I had this brilliant idea to create a digital bookmark called Lexicus. This was way back before the iPhone and Kindle.
My idea for Lexicus was to make it look like an old-school bookmark with a tiny camera and flexible display. The magic was that when you came across a word you didn’t know, you could use the camera to scan it, and bam! – the display would show the results. You could look up any word, like a hypertext link, without having to reach for a dictionary or – God forbid – a clunky encyclopedia. When you weren’t using it, it would tuck among the pages and not interfere with your reading experience. It felt so right that the digital and analog worlds could work together so seamlessly.
“How hard can it be, right? Turns out it was harder than anyone thought.”
To make it possible, everything about Lexicus had to be supernano. The camera would be tiny, the circuit board and display would be flexible, and the battery would last forever. How hard can it be, right?
Turns out it was harder than anyone thought. It was just too early for its time, and probably still is. These days I read only on the Kindle. I don’t see myself going back to analog, ever. But here’s the thing: There are tons of analog books out there that will never be digitized. So I think there’s a viable market for Lexicus. At the end of the day, I think it’s important to keep having harebrained ideas. As Stephen Hunt said, “If you’re not living on the edge, then you’re taking up too much space.”
2. A window that tells you the history of what you see:
Alexis Lloyd, head of design innovation, Automattic
A couple of jobs ago, I was working as the creative director of the New York Times R&D Lab. We were tasked with looking at emerging technologies and building experience prototypes that explored how those changes might impact news and media – specifically the Times.
We had a lab space on the 28th floor of the New York Times Building, which had floor-to-ceiling windows. We were right across from the old McGraw-Hill Building, which has this incredible mosaic work that you can’t see unless you’re in a skyscraper next to it. I’m fascinated by New York’s density of history and stories. I would look out those windows and want to know the stories behind all the buildings, those invisible layers of history embedded in the built environment.
I had this idea of that window becoming a transparent overlay, where I could point at a building and get some contextual information about the architecture. How do you take historical stories – stories that the Times might have covered – and situate them in a physical space?
“That idea was well served, even though the actual specific concept was never fulfilled.”
It turned out there were a lot of reasons why that wasn’t feasible to do. Transparent displays are hard to come by, and back then they maxed out at 16 inches. We were looking at those big, metal binocular telescopes they have at the top of the Empire State Building, thinking, Maybe we can use these and hack the display. But there was never quite the combination of the impetus and technological ability to pull it off. The lesson I learned was not to be too literal about your ideas or too attached to one particular manifestation of them. Some of these ideas made their way into other really cool projects. That idea was well served, even though the actual specific concept was never fulfilled.
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