This link needs a preamble, because nowhere on the site does it spell out exactly what you’re looking at.
A “Concept Car,” if I understand it correctly, is “an automobile prototype that is fully functional, save being hooked up into the engine.” Concept cars allow design and engineering teams the means to make critical product decisions that no other process can replace.
Not very helpful here, I know. But take that definition and apply it to the digital realm, and you get a “Digital Concept Car” — a digital prototype (be it a website, a kiosk, a mobile app, etc) that allows all involved to make decisions and modifications up through launch of said product.
Still with me? Presented at the link above is a cross-section of the viability of certain prototyping tools and techniques for building “Digital Concept Cars” that articulate (in varying degrees of fidelity) the intended behavior of your digital product. The chart is amazingly simple yet detailed, defining each stage in a number of variables (will the code be reusable, is it fast to iterate, etc.) for a range of digital products: from html to flash to AIR, for websites, mobile apps or kiosks. It’s a great resource for designers to reference daily.
The chart is so in-depth and easy to use, its unfortunate it had to be called something as obtuse as “Building a Digital Concept Car”. Not sure what it should be called, but getting past the fact that this is indeed not intended in car design is quite difficult.
Take a look at the code on the page, too. Not a single flash element. All that movement is created using jquery and kuler. Pretty amazing stuff.
Created by Andrei Herasimchuk, Chief Design Officer at Involution Studios. Andrei was also the person who conceptualized the creative direction for what would become the Adobe Creative Suite (so you can blame him for the appearance of all Adobe interfaces). Found via information aesthetics. I’ve taken liberal amounts of explanatory copy from that site as well as Ghost in the Pixel in order to help better understand it myself.
