I’m storyboarding away and working on a section about design concepts: examples and processes for making them. This write-up of the Chamr concept process is a good overview, and I’m looking for more in case you know of any.

In a nutshell, the Adaptive Path team started with research, then expressed important principles and major user activities to design for. Then they brainstormed hundreds of ideas and filtered them. Then one team member offers a new idea that nails it. I’m guessing the team so thoroughly internalized the research and constraints by this point in the project that they could evaluate a new idea quickly, in addition to recognizing the sexiness of it.

Later… There isn’t much online, perhaps because the most mature examples are from non-digital design fields such as industrial design, architecture, and digital art. I have some hypotheses about why there’s little conceptual design in the software world, but they’re still half-baked.