Generative Placeholders
One constant issue in design is how to represent a half-finished design. It has to be representative enough to get the idea across, but if it looks too polished or finished people will mistake it for the final design and have expectations that the mockup can’t live up to. The best case scenario for temporary placeholders is the way Kubrick’s classical music temp track for 2001: A Space Odyssey ended up being the final soundtrack, but more frequently you just end up with people complaining that the buttons on the JPEG of your mockup look real but don’t work when you click on them.
Enter Generative Placeholders. Instead of using a temp image, you can just link to the generative-placeholders service and get a procedurally-generated temp image. It looks good (making your designs look good) but also looks generated (making people less likely to mistake it for the finished product). It’s like lorem ipsum for images.
It’s a good demonstration of Emily Short’s discussion of the use of obviously generated artifacts. While a lot of virtual ink has been spilled talking about how to generate artifacts that are indistinguishable from what a human would create, there are also uses for artifacts that were obviously machine-made.
Here, the obvious machine nature of the artifacts, with content divorced from the page that embeds the generated image, makes the generated a subordinate element that fades into the background. In a videogame, having a lot of obviously generated things helps add greebly detail to the world without distracting the player from the parts they can actually interact with. It’s similar to how games can use repetition to have an abstract bit of gameplay represent an ongoing process. Or, for a specific example, how doors at the edges of the map in Thief: the Dark Project that aren’t intended for the player to open don’t have doorknobs. We can have the world detail (a symbolic door) without worrying about handling the weird affordances of things that are just supposed to be a painted theatrical backdrop anyway.