(Illustrated above) A scientist’s use of her analysis application is highly contingent on what trends she discovers in her lab’s clinical results. Within the tool’s data visualization functionalities, her goals can change drastically based on the patterns that appear after each visual transformation that she explores.

An architect is working in her building modeling application on a floor plan for a hospital’s critical care ward. She tries out a number of different rough layouts that could meet the project’s requirements, evolving her own criteria for a successful solution as she explores different ideas.

A financial trader’s work is primarily composed of frequent, brief, discrete, and habitual actions. However, some parts of his work are often not so routine, such as conversations about problematic trades or large potential deals, both of which can follow irregular processes and require unpredictable amounts of time.

What tasks or larger activities, within the scope of work that your team is investigating, take shape through the improvisational structure of workers’ practices? What do targeted workers accomplish in these open and emergent scenarios and variations?

What are the initiating goals in each of these cases? How can those goals evolve through different series of actions?

Is the knowledge work domain that your team is targeting trending toward more improvisation or toward further specialization of defined processes and roles?

How do targeted individuals and their organizations view the importance of open and emergent practices? Do they wish they were more standardized? Do they value their openness?

What situations in these improvisational scenarios trigger workers to make decisions about subsequent approaches and actions?

What are the most important points of flexibility for your team to consider when attempting to support these work practices?

What other patterns and regularities can your team find in these “clouds” of potential scenarios? How might you use these insights to ideate useful and meaningful functionality concepts?

How could support for these practices impact the overall scope and frameworks of your application concepts?

How far might your team push certain flexibilities for open and emergent practices before the interaction clarity of your sketched computing tools begins to break down?

Do you have enough information to usefully answer these and other envisioning questions? What additional research, problem space models, and design concepting could valuably inform your team’s application envisioning efforts?