(Illustrated above) A scientist users the integral communication options in her lab’s information management application to communicate with laboratory staff, outside vendors, and distant collaborators. This integration saves some work when starting communication tasks, and it also ties communication acts and information with related laboratory data in the systemn.

A financial trader just completed a complex transaction with many parts. To ensure that the back office workers who will process the trade have the information that they need, he uses his trading application to add some special instructions to the completed trade form.

An architect closes her building modeling application. As the tool shuts down, she opts to use a function that will send a status report to selected recipients on her team. This report will contain a summary of changes that she has made to the building model during her work session.

What trajectories of work practice that your team is striving to mediate involve intentional communication as part of their initiation or completion?

How do targeted individuals currently communicate while cooperating or collaborating around information artifacts?

What communication channels do workers use as part of targeted operations, tasks, and larger activities?

Which active communication practices do workers currently find to be problematic or tedious? Why?

What larger design and technology trends could influence your team’s ideas about supporting integral communication within your product?

How might your sketched functionality concepts conveniently tie into workers’ existing communication channels in goal oriented ways?

What new functionality concepts might your team envision to make communication easier and more meaningful within targeted work practices?

How might communication be different when recipients are not users of your computing tool? How could these “external” conversations remain clearly tied to your product?

How might your team’s approaches for supporting integral communication relate to your other functionality concepts for supporting cooperation, collaboration, and workspace awareness?

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?