The factory design had to become inspectable by the people approving it.

Factory designers could create sophisticated models. GM, Ford, and other major automakers needed a way to show those designs to executives making consequential commitments.

The models described factories with many-million-dollar budgets. Their usefulness had to cross from specialist design into executive due diligence and signoff.

Howard Pearlmutter created the bridge.

The representation acquired another audience.

He designed, coded, tested, and integrated a commercial web-enabled animated virtual-reality executive due-diligence and signoff system for factory designs.

He completed the product in nineteen weeks and wrote 100% of its application code.

The contribution changed how another group could encounter the design. A specialist model became something executives could inspect through an animated, interactive web experience.

That is a powerful form of communication: the technical capability and the audience's practical responsibility are connected through working software.

A new medium opens particular kinds of understanding.

A paragraph can state a conclusion. A diagram can expose relationships. Animation can show change. Interaction can give the viewer a choice about what to examine next.

Each form has strengths. The creative task is to choose and combine them through the audience's actual need.

For the factory system, inspection mattered. The executive audience needed another way into what the designers had built, while the substance of the design remained important.

Read interactive explanation and image with words.

The same practice has met other subjects.

Howard's NASA study, Interactive Computer Graphics: The Human Interface to Dynamic Simulation, explored the human encounter with dynamic models.

His own C/GL modeling and rendering software brought Fuller's geometric relationships into motion in a segment of Ecological Design: Inventing the Future.

In a 2012 rich-media showroom prototype, the interface was designed to support phone conversations with distribution and retail buyers as well as public brand positioning.

These were different undertakings. Each joined subject knowledge, technical form, and the experience of a particular audience.

Read NASA, ecological animation, and the showroom.

Preserve the promise as the form changes.

The headline may introduce a possibility. A depth page can explain its mechanism. A prototype can make it tangible. The next action can invite a person to participate, inquire, or inspect further.

The relationship among those surfaces matters. What attracted attention should lead into a fuller understanding of the same value.

An image does not have to repeat every word. A short page does not have to contain the whole explanation. Each can do its part while preserving the important distinction for the next encounter.

Try the three-surface coherence exercise and branching journeys.

Begin with the audience's task.

What do people need to recognize, question, approve, learn, or use? What currently prevents that understanding? Which representation could change the encounter?

A technical story, interactive explanation, or prototype can develop from those questions.

Bring the subject you want to make more intelligible.

The strongest form gives the person a better way to meet the substance of the work.