(Illustrated above) An architect selects a segment of a design in her building modeling application to “check it out” so that she can make some small modifications, only to find that the segment is currently checked out by a consulting civil engineer. The application provides her an option to work in an alternate version of the segment, which no one else will be able to access until she later merges it back with the main version of the model.

A financial trader attempts to trade all of his firm’s holdings of a particular security, but his trading application displays a message that prevents him from completing the transaction. It seems that part of the total amount has been locked by another trader who has indicated that he wants to use it as part of a higher value deal.

A scientist cannot change the name of a clinical sample in her lab’s information management application because an automated instrument is currently processing portions of the sample’s tissue.

What rules do targeted individuals implicitly or explicitly follow to promote the effective sharing of artifacts within the work practices that your team is striving to mediate?

How much emphasis do workers place on ownership and availability rules in their observed practices? Are these rules valued and useful components of their operative cultures?

How, specifically, do existing rules promote coordination and prevent conflicts? What would happen if they were not in place?

How could your team translate these existing practices into ownership and availability rules for interaction objects in your computing tool?

What new opportunities for conflict might your product create, simply by bringing collaboration and cooperation into an abstract computing environment?

What larger design and technology trends could influence your team’s ideas about what appropriately applied, logically feasible, and understandably clear rules could look like?

What conventional patterns might your team reference in the design of object ownership and availability interactions?

What overall, “global” rules might your application concepts follow in order to control the ownership and availability of objects?

Which of your team’s envisioned scenarios for mediating work could present unusual situations where conflicts may occur and additional rules could be valuable? How might these special solutions differ from your “global” rules?

How could users’ interactions within your sketched functionality concepts help them to situationally build accurate conceptual models around object ownership and availability in your product?

How might these rules relate to your team’s ideas about workspace awareness at the application level or within specific functional areas?

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?