Sustainability, or the idea of zero waste and reuse of things created (concepts & code), also applies to the world of user interface prototyping. On one hand, there might be a push to build prototypes of such quality that the code that they rest on could be reused further in the development process. This so called “sustainability across a process” is just one approach of how UI waste can be reduced. Another way of building sustainable prototypes is by reusing elements from project to project. So if on one project a widget was used in a prototype, and then the same code is used on another project, it would be a sustainable act as well. This I’ll call “sustainability across projects”.

The truth is that at times there is more value of building “throw away” prototypes that are not of production ready quality. Building something quickly without regard for code quality, learning a lot from it, and then correcting the design direction could be more fruitful than building “high quality” prototypes whose code makes it into the future. However, in order to support sustainable or reusable prototype elements across projects, of course we need the right tools and setup. The idea of relying on emergent patterns is a sustainable across projects concept which EightShapes has been supporting with their unify framework, but also something I potentially want to implement for fluidia.