Some of the most interesting work I've ever done, I can barely show you. That's the nature of concept work: by the time it's safe to talk about, the world has moved on, and by the time the world has moved on, you've half-forgotten you did it. So let me tell you about the phone that didn't exist.
The name first. Blank-a-gon was an internal working codename, from "blank polygonal phone." The handset never got a proper name, the placeholder stuck, and years later the placeholder is the only name there is. That tells you most of what you need to know about the project.
The prop was a featureless slab of glossy black acrylic with rounded corners. No metal rim, no ports, no branding. Just glass, edge to edge, years before edge-to-edge phones were a thing you could buy. It was a stand-in for a device that didn't exist, and it was blank on purpose: my job was to design the future-facing interface and composite it into every shot. At Sandwich, they leave a box in the edit that says "UI goes here." At Google, in 2015, the box was the entire phone.
I directed, produced, and edited the piece, shot on location at Google HQ in Mountain View. The audience was a handful of key stakeholders; the production standard was commercial anyway, because a vision argued at draft quality reads as a draft vision. The door in was a relationship from my HUGE Design years; the longer version of that story can wait for the full essay. The prop was the canvas. The interface was the product. Vision translation, as a literal physical object you could hold.
A few years later, HBO's Silicon Valley aired, and the whole aesthetic of secret future hardware on a tech campus was suddenly on television, played for laughs. I watched it with the particular satisfaction of the unciteable. Yup. They nailed it.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.