(Illustrated above) A scientist uses her laboratory’s information management system to find out who accomplished several different experimental tasks on a particular clinical sample. She discovers which lab technician ran the sample through a certain instrument, and, seeing that he is currently online, she clicks on his name to launch a chat session, asking if he is free to talk.

An architect uses her building modeling application to look up which team members made a particular set of changes to a design. She sees that one of the change’s authors is currently logged into the shared tool, so she walks over to have a conversation with him at his desk.

A financial trader looks in his trading application to see whether any of his colleagues are currently trading at his firm’s London office. If they are, he can simply click on their name to initiate a voice chat.

What circumstances in the work practices that your team is striving to mediate currently lead people to investigate who has previously acted on an information artifact?

How do targeted individuals and their organizations currently keep track of authorship in various contexts?

What are the cultural norms, regulatory rules, and political implications around tracking worker’s actions in targeted organizations? How is authorship information currently used in formal, procedural workflows and the evaluation of critical incidents?

Which tasks or larger activities currently involve impromptu, real time communications? Which are accomplished in relative seclusion?

How do targeted workers currently keep track of which colleagues are presently available for communication? How do they typically initiate conversations?

What larger design trends and advanced analogies to other domains could influence your team’s ideas about thoughtfully highlighting authorship and presence information in your application concepts?

How might examining your sketched functional areas and interaction objects from the goal orientations of users’ own collaborators help your team to envision different concepts for identity and presence cues?

How might “created by” and “modified by” attributes in interaction objects provide value in cooperative and collaborative work practices?

How might cues about individuals’ actions or current presence be used as a means of initiating contact with them? What interruption effects may result on the receiver’s end in these scenarios?

How might your team’s approaches for supporting authorship, presence information, and contact facilitation relate to your other functionality concepts for supporting cooperation, collaboration, and workspace awareness?

What unwanted surveillance effects could unintentionally occur from strongly connecting users’ identities and activities to specific application data?

What other privacy and security issues could be important to consider when envisioning functionalities that could be used to track workers’ actions and lightweight, unstructured conversations?

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?