(Illustrated above) An architect is having a phone meeting with an energy consultant. Since the specific design features under discussion are difficult to verbally describe, she selects an option in her building modeling application to share her view of a 3D display. The consultant, who is also using the same product, can then easily see the portions of the model that the architect is pointing at with her cursor.

A financial trader instant messages a particular trade’s identifying information to a remote colleague. This information allows them to both have the same data pulled up in their respective applications while talking through an issue over the phone.

A scientist selects a link in an email from her colleague regarding the clinical study that they are both working on. Her analysis application launches with its visualizations displayed in a way that highlights the trends that her colleague mentioned in the email message.

How do targeted individuals currently establish common visual ground for communication in the work practices that your team is striving to mediate?

What value do different types of common ground provide?

What information representations are commonly referenced in communication acts? What features of these representations are often important to share?

What language and gestures do knowledge workers currently use when referring to their shared information artifacts?

What breakdowns and errors in shared understanding can currently occur around these artifacts? How might the flexible displays of your team’s computing tool aggravate these problems or create new ones in a similar vein?

What larger design and technology trends could influence your ideas about how content in your application concepts could be conversationally shared?

What conventional design patterns and functionalities might your team consider using in order to valuably support common ground?

What interaction objects in your sketched product directions could extend or replace the information artifacts that workers currently “gather around”?

What aspects of your functionality concepts might workers opportunistically use to create common ground? How could your team enhance these aspects to promote such use?

What novel functionality concepts might your team envision to provide workers with new options to dynamically share relevant information within their discussions?

How might your team’s approaches for supporting representational common ground relate to your other concepts for supporting cooperation, collaboration, and workspace awareness?

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

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?