(Illustrated above) A scientist arrives at her clinical lab and launches her analysis application. She selects the option to resume working on the last project that she had open, and the application displays every element of her view just as she had left it, including a reminder that she had entered to tell herself what to do next.

An architect logs out of her building modeling application so that she can attend a meeting, knowing that the exact same view, along with a message about her colleagues’ current project tasks, will be called up when she logs back in after the meeting is over.

A financial trader leaves an incomplete trade form open in his trading application while he books a more time sensitive deal. The half empty form serves as a reminder about the unfinished trade and allows him to quickly resume the task later.

How often do targeted individuals currently step away from and return to the work practices that your team is striving to mediate? What are some common scenarios for setting aside work? What do knowledge workers have to remember when resuming targeted tasks or larger activities?

How does the structure of their environments currently help them to recall “their place”?

What memory cues do they purposefully add for themselves? What other strategies do they employ to more quickly and accurately refocus their attentions on earlier threads?

What errors can occur when workers resume previous efforts? Could these problems present opportunities for your team’s product?

What larger design and technology trends could influence your ideas about how your application concepts could support reconnection with work in progress?

How might your team’s sketched functionalities reduce the difficulty of returning to earlier threads of work?

What application events, such as logging in or reopening a particular work item, could provide useful opportunities to implicitly recreate workers’ views within your computing tool?

What specific interaction objects or application level elements could be restored in ways that may remind workers’ of “their place?”

What explicit methods of bookmarking or otherwise cataloging work progress might workers find valuable?

How might shared uses of application content present opportunities to valuably highlight important changes as workers’ resume their “paused” efforts?

How might your team’s approaches for work resumption relate to your other concepts for supporting cognitive tracing, cooperation, collaboration, and workspace awareness?

How might your application concepts provide additional support in these areas for an aging knowledge workforce?

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?