If you’re in the midst of an extended project with multiple releases over a number or months you may worry about the erosion of the overall strategic vision. After many weeks of effort a team’s initial optimism will have been diluted by handling unforeseen issues, scope-creep and the culminative fatigue of hitting date after date.

Over time each team will move away from each other, manipulating their understanding of the project strategy as they solve their immediate problems. Project plans, functional specifications and whole methodologies will be cast aside as release dates approach and hands reach for the pump.

I recently attended a presentation by a UX designer who had been working on overhauling a household-name social network. He was relating lessons he had learned from the project and eventually came to talk about methodologies. “What development methodologies did we use? All of them I think. Various types of agile and so on, but in the end we went back to waterfall. It just worked for us.”.

Jumping from one methodology to another, thinking about how they were working rather than actually creating things, had worn the team down. They were in pieces and in a word, aimless. They needed to get that vision back and to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Evidencing with tangible futures

Evidencing is the act of creating fictional artifacts that communicate the result of a step within a process or a physical outcome of an overall process. For example, if your designing a paid for service you may mock-up an invoice, and a thank you message for prompt payment.

Tangible futures are a particular type of evidencing. They are fictional artifacts created to indicate an achivable future for your project. These artifacts communicate the expected result of your strategy and give your team’s a shared direction and aim.

These artifacts could be press releases, magazine covers, blog posts, launch party invite, etc.

You could focus on a list of features in an advertisement or mock-up an ideal writeup from a technology blog. The point is get your thinking about the purpose of your work and where it’s all leading.

Flickr has put tangible futures to use recently. At the beginning of a project they mocked-up a fake blog post announcing the launch of the new features and put a printout on the wall in high traffic areas of their office. For them the physical evidence of a future state of their product was not only motivational but acted as a anchor for general discussion on features and strategy.

If you’re working on the kind of project I’ve mentioned start thinking about where your projects should be going and what the outcomes would look like, then start infusing you own design strategy into tangible futures.