In 2015 I helped Google prototype a phone that didn't exist, on a phone that was just a blank slab of black glass. A surprising amount of what we faked has since come true.
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 a project by the only name I ever knew it by: Blank-agon.
In 2015 I did a piece of future-concept work for Google. The job, in the broadest terms I'm comfortable describing, was to visualize interface and interaction ideas that didn't exist yet, to make a convincing, filmable demonstration of where certain things might go. Speculative UI. A proof of concept, but a cinematic one, meant to make an idea feel real and inevitable rather than theoretical.
The phone at the center of it was not a phone. It was a blank black polygon: a featureless slab of dark glass, a stand-in object with no screen, no buttons, no brand, nothing. Hence the name I gave it in my own head and my own files: Blank-agon. A blank glass polygon pretending to be the future.
My job was twofold. First, I shot all the scenes: the human moments, the hands, the contexts, the blank device sitting in real light in a real world. Then I designed the interface: the actual UI, the motion, the way information would appear and move and respond: and composited it onto and around that blank slab, frame by frame, until the empty polygon looked like a living, responding device running software that, again, did not exist.
This is, when you say it plainly, a strange and specific kind of magic. You are not visualizing a product that exists. You are not even visualizing a product that's planned, exactly. You are visualizing a hypothesis. You're taking a set of "what if it worked like this" ideas and giving them enough physical, photographic, motion reality that a viewer's brain accepts them as a thing that could be held and used. The blank polygon is almost a philosophical object: a deliberate void that exists only to receive a projected future.
What I can say, looking back from 2026, is that a striking amount of what we faked onto that blank slab has since become ordinary. Ideas that were speculative in 2015: interaction patterns, ways of surfacing information, behaviours: quietly turned real over the following years, shipped in products, became things people use every day without a second thought. I'm being deliberately vague, both because I should be and because the specifics matter less than the phenomenon: concept work, when it's good, isn't fantasy. It's a forecast. The best speculative UI isn't making things up; it's seeing slightly early.
There's a reason this kind of work sits so close to the center of how I think about my whole practice. I've spent a lot of years describing what I do as "research-to-reality translation": taking the deep, often half-formed, often confidential thinking that lives inside innovation teams and making it legible, persuasive, and real-feeling to the people who need to understand it, decide on it, or build it. Blank-agon is almost the purest expression of that. There was no product to photograph, so the entire burden of making the idea real fell on craft: on the shooting, the designing, the compositing, the motion. The believability had nowhere to hide.
And that's the thing I'd most want a student to take from it. Concept and speculative work isn't a lesser, fluffier cousin of "real" product design. It's arguably harder, because you have no ground truth. When you composite a UI onto a shipping phone, the product anchors you. It has to look like the real thing. When you composite a UI onto a blank polygon, nothing anchors you. You're responsible for the entire reality. Every choice: how fast something animates, how light catches a surface that doesn't exist, how a hand relates to a screen that isn't there, is load-bearing. Get any of it slightly wrong and the whole illusion collapses into "that's obviously fake." Get it right and you've shown someone the future convincingly enough that they go and build it.
I keep almost none of the receipts on this one. I can't show you the screens. But it remains a piece of work I'm quietly proudest of, precisely because it was so close to pure: an empty black shape, a set of ideas about how things might work, and the craft to fuse them into something a person would believe. The future, comped onto a blank slab of glass, a few years before it arrived.
[DRAFT NOTE, RIGHTS: the ideas can likely be discussed abstractly now, but you probably cannot show the actual screens or the film (Google NDA / unreleased-concept material). Default to describe-the-craft; only show your own process work if cleared. Confirm before publishing any frames.]