(Illustrated above) A financial trader often says that he knows trade forms better than he knows “his own name.” He has used various forms at the different firms where he has worked, though all of them have had the same essential organization and format.

An architect uses her building modeling application to generate the types of drawings that are traditionally expected as architectural outputs. While she used to labor over the plans themselves, her team now spends more time focusing on different views of a comprehensive virtual model, from which drawings can be generated.

A scientist views the genetic expression data from a large series of clinical experiments in her analysis application. The data is displayed in a “heat plot,” which she is very familiar with after having seen similar visuals in research publications.

How have established genres of representation evolved over time in the tasks and larger activities that your team is striving to mediate?

How, specifically, do people use these known representations? How do defined formats scope and shape workers’ efforts?

What do targeted individuals and their organizations think of their standard information designs? What benefits are these genres seen as providing?

Do targeted workers view established formats as essentially immutable or are they open to extending them based on emergent needs and design possibilities?

What errors and misinterpretations can commonly be traced back to the characteristics of established representations? Could these problems present opportunities for your team’s product?

How might the onscreen representations of your envisioned interaction objects directly reference any established information artifacts that you have derived them from?

How could preserving existing information designs help workers apply their existing skills and decrease their learning efforts during the adoption of a new product? Where might a change in format provide sufficient value to justify additional effort on the part of users?

Which existing representational genres could be translated into your sketched application concepts fairly directly? Which might require extension or modification in order to effectively make the transition into your computing tool?

How might your team’s adaptations of common representational genres provide users with new opportunities for useful coordinations, view transformations, interactive explorations, integral communication, onscreen collaboration, and organizational memory?

How might certain interactions with known displays of meaningful content promote emotional responses that are conducive to attentive, focused thinking?

How might existing genres serve as an inspirational reference for envisioning other, seemingly unrelated functionality concepts?

What impact might the reuse of known representations have on design strategy and brand? What could it mean, in a bigger picture sense, to “conservatively advance” knowledge work in your targeted markets?

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?