I was asked to join Microsoft to work on a highly secretive project without a single hint as to what it was other than my background would be useful to the team. Fortunately I took the risk and joined the Hololens team and was blessed to find an incredibly talented Design team and UX Researchers that taught me to think from a UX perspective and set a high bar for what the UX Research and Design workflow could be.
My role as a Creative Technologist was to work with the Design team to come up with concepts that Distinguished Designer Nando Costa would lend his creative vision to and fully flesh out into beautiful works of art that we would then have motion graphics designers bring to life, 3d artists that would convert concepts into design assets and would pass on to me to make the interactions and design into actual working prototypes made in Unity and running on prototype hardware. I also worked alongside the system architect to see how the designs would fit into the overall system design and Operating System that at the time was a very elaborate Unity prototype.
The majority of the work we did on the Design team was a reference design that we'd feed to Engineering who would optimize and re-architect elements to make the real products that would ship. Working with Engineering regularly to make sure our designs were possible and created in a way that we had a path to launch.
