(Illustrated above) An architect frequently reviews her project work with one or more colleagues in her firm, either formally or informally. While this used to typically occur face to face, writing on paper printouts, her company’s new building modeling application now allows her to meet online with team members from different global offices in a shared, highly visual workspace.

A financial trader sometimes shares the details of important pending deals with other traders in his group. Their firm’s trading application allows him to save draft proposals of large, complex deals to a shared location where his colleagues can access and work on them.

A scientist sets up her clinical research lab’s information management application in a way that allows certain lab technicians to “own” certain tasks. She makes an exception for quality checking procedures, which will require the input of two separate lab techs.

What tasks or larger activities, within the scope of work practice that your team is investigating, are inherently collaborative?

What parts of knowledge work that could otherwise be considered individualistic have collaborative or cooperative variations?

What do targeted workers accomplish in these scenarios and variations?

What are their goals in each of these cases?

What breakdowns in work practice are currently caused or aggravated by cooperative and collaborative interactions? Could these problems represent potential opportunities for your team’s product?

Is the knowledge work domain that you are targeting trending toward more collaboration or toward further specialization of defined processes and roles?

How do targeted individuals and their organizations view the importance of collaborative practices? Do they wish they were more individualistic? More collaborative?

What specific aspects and effects of collaboration do workers perceive as valuable? Which are inherently important for successful outcomes?

What other patterns and regularities might your team find in shared, convivial practices? 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 collaborative scenarios and variations 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?