Over the past 15 years, the creators of British cinema have resembled nothing so much as a bunch of frustrated alchemists; leaving a trail of failed potions and misconceived prototypes in their wake.
The relative crudeness of the work suggested until now that the works were copies, but research published in the magazine Sapiens by the architect David Agulló and the geologist Daniel Barbé shows that they pre-date Gaudí's signature buildings and were in fact prototypes for features in Park Güell, the Sagrada Familia and the nearby Colònia Güell, all of which Gaudí was working on at the time.
It's a highwire act – if the hole's too big or in the wrong place, if light leaks in from elsewhere in your box or you mistime your exposure, you run the risk of ending up with a bunch of images that look like disused prototypes for terrible album covers from the 90s.
His office is in Apple's design studio, protected by a 10ft-long internal vestibule that obscures all the prototypes and work from all but the permitted to enter.
Prototypes of the new devices – which can take pictures or videos of what the wearer is seeing, and display information in a small screen visible to them above their right eye – are now out for testing with about a thousand early users worldwide.
"Many years ago we made prototypes of phones with bigger screens.
Not only do the outputs of these processes contain rich and specific insights, but they also provide early prototypes for behaviour change solutions in themselves.
Related: iPhone 6 review: thinner, faster and slightly cheaper It took Ive three years to settle on the screen sizes for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, with prototypes made from 4in to over 6in before the end of 2011.
Colleagues carried around the prototypes for days.
It is developing these protocols and building prototypes that adhere to them, and inviting others to follow suit.
New entrants keep popping up: at the Geneva motor show in March, Qoros, a Chinese start-up, caused a stir by exhibiting good-looking prototypes.
