(Illustrated above) A scientist navigates through different views of clinical data in her analysis application, narrowing in on areas that show interesting trends. As she selects certain subsets of data, she changes the tool’s view to employ specialized visualizations for detailed inspection of smaller result sets.

A financial trader uses his market information application to review recent movements in a range of market sectors. He selects a high volume sector where advances led declines, and the visualization zooms in on the selected area to display its subsectors, along with their individual directionalities.

An architect is using her building modeling application to review a colleague’s project. She views the entire building, rendered as if it actually existed on its large site, then zooms into the front entry space, opting to view only construction notes over unrendered wireframes.

Where might volumes of stored data overload the representations that people currently use in the work practices that your team is striving to mediate?

Why might targeted individuals and organizations want to visualize information at different levels of aggregation? What problems could scaling levels of information representation solve?

How might new levels of information display meet unaddressed goals in targeted tasks or larger activities? What aspects of these new displays could offload effort or enhance certain lines of analytical thought and explorative sense making?

Based on your team’s understanding of workers’ goals, their current usage of representations, and other factors, what analogous displays from other domains could be applicable to your envisioned directions for scaling data visualizations?

What larger design and technology trends could influence your ideas about how information in your application concepts could be valuably represented and navigated at different levels of concentration?

What novel concepts might your team sketch for higher volume information representations that are tailored to targeted knowledge work goals?

How could workers usefully navigate through connections between different levels or represented information? What meaningful frameworks and interactive transitions might your team envision to clarify the relationships between representational strata?

How could your computing tool introduce and frame the value of new systems of interrelated displays? What instruction and initial scaffolding might be useful while individuals are learning to use these new representations?

How might your team’s ideas about supporting visualization at different levels relate to your other design responses for supporting work in the context of volumes of information?

What impact might the inclusion of new visualization approaches have on design strategy and brand? What could it mean, in a bigger picture sense, to “disruptively 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?