(Illustrated above) A scientist is organizing clinical samples in her analysis application before she starts another round of experiments in a large research study. She creates groupings that will allow her to easily select a series of tests for the same clinical subject and visualize them as different phases in the same time series.

An architect defines a classification method for a project’s material attributes in her building modeling application so that her team can organize material options as they are added to the system. At a high level, her team has decided to categorize materials primarily by the building areas where the will be used, and secondarily, by color.

A financial trader quickly browses a market information feed, applying tags to news items that he sees as potentially relevant for his firm. He knows that when colleagues search the same feed, results that have been tagged with categories by any trader within his organization will appear at the top of the list in an attention grabbing format.

Who generally defines the organizational schemes and standards that people currently use in the work practices that your team is striving to mediate? Are there both top down and bottom up sources of standardization?

How do these standards vary within your targeted markets?

How have these schemes evolved into their present states over time? Historically, what forces have typically driven updates?

How frequently do classifications and categorizations change?

How do targeted knowledge workers’ different roles and goal orientations currently drive different uses of the same information schemes?

How do people use the language of information categories to create common ground, facilitating collaborative sense making and action?

What expectations around information organization have workers developed from using other interactive applications?

How might the addition of your computing tool into certain work practices affect how volumes of information could be usefully organized?

What larger technology trends and advanced analogies to other domains could valuably inform your team’s ideation around relevant information organization concepts?

What inherently useful organizing structures could be present in the relationships between and among your sketched interaction objects and functionality concepts?

What conventional interaction options and design patterns could allow users to flexibly create and appropriately apply needed organization schemes?

What new top down or bottom up categorization and classification options might people opportunistically make use of?

What novel functionality concepts might your team envision to decrease or remove effort that would otherwise be needed to organize information in desirable ways?

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?