(Illustrated above) A scientist opens a file in her analysis application that contains data from a previous clinical study. Since the old study shares some similar parameters with her current work, she reviews the stored information to remind herself which analysis processes had previously led to valuable insights.

An architect, when faced with a problem in her current work, opens up older versions of the same building project in her building modeling application. She uses the stored information to help her remember how she had worked with civil engineers to resolve similar issues in their past.

A financial trader uses his trading application to view his group’s deals from yesterday so that he can see how much business he did with a particular entity. Without the tool’s stored record, he would probably only be able to recall a few of the bigger ticket transactions.

How do targeted individuals currently record and keep track of information that they would otherwise need to recall from their own long term memories?

What artifacts do knowledge workers create in order to offload their memory efforts and make information available to multiple people over time?

When do workers turn to these artifacts? What role do they play in targeted operations, tasks, and larger activities?

What long term recollection errors are common? Could these problems present opportunities for your team’s product?

How much emphasis do individual workers and larger groups place on the creation and maintenance of collective, organizational memories?

What larger design and technology trends could influence your team’s ideas about how your computing tool might offload certain long term memory efforts?

How might existing processes for personal and organizational memory be incorporated into your sketched functionality concepts?

Which memory cuing features of existing artifacts could be enhanced within your application’s displays? How might your team tailor the representations of certain interaction objects in order to support workers’ own memory strategies?

What new data in your application concepts could lead to new sources of memory load? How might your product usefully record and present this content in ways that could alleviate these potential burdens?

During what tasks and larger activities could people benefit from being able to easily and directly access relevant stored information? What might these access points and pathways look like in your sketched functionality concepts?

What life expectancy could different types of stored information have? Could stored content ever become a hindrance or source of clutter in workers’ activities?

How might your application concepts provide additional long term memory support 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?