Like many people, I care about my work. I want to do a good job on every project that I work on. I’ve also been out in the world enough to know that healthy critique and user feedback are critical to enhance projects, so I’m also not that protective of my work. People have opinions, and they have every right to them.

On the whole, most work developed for a project is used, albeit with some trimming here and there. It’s rare to have created work that is not used at all.

Proving Others’ Concepts

The usual “use case” for proof-of-concept designs is actually after a grant has been funded, and the grant recipients have to deliver. Then, we have to cobble the technologies and align the work in order to proceed. The grant funding oversight is usually good enough that the technological piece is actually doable with the available tech. In these cases, every bit of work is used because these projects tend to be that ambitious.

Evolutionary Prototypes

Evolutionary prototypes are those that are mock-ups with placeholder images and text, but these are evolved into full functionality (and deployment) at some point. That’s the expectation. They evolve into a kind of completion.

I’ve never had outright throwaway work, which models a product or a system and then is not used at all. One project came close—with verification of a technology for delivering a kind of storytelling but with the supervisor neither liking the imagery nor some aspects of the storyline. Here, we kept the frame but not the initial contents.

Finding Applications

Sometimes, it takes a bit of creativity to see how to use the various digital contents and the design ideas. The interesting thing is that a problem solved once will reoccur, and it just takes being aware of the analogical application to create something new. None of that learning is ever lost, even if a project ends up with a side piece that is shelved temporarily.