(Illustrated above) A scientist prints a series of visualizations in her analysis application and passes them out as handouts in a laboratory meeting. The series of printed pages allows the group to collectively see a large clinical data set from a variety of perspectives. As they spot trends, she writes notes on her own set of printouts and dives into further visualizations on a shared projection screen.

An architect tries to work as much as feasible in her building modeling application so that her team can have access to her changes in something close to real time. However, there are still many parts of the design process, such as early ideation or the collaborative marking of quick corrections, where she finds it easier to sit at a table with her colleagues and communicate around printouts.

A financial trader prints a problematic trade and hands it to a colleague. This interchange provides him with strong confirmation that the work, and all of the necessary information around it, has been handed off.

What affordances of paper documents do targeted individuals and organizations currently value?

How do off screen documents currently facilitate communication and collaboration?

How do targeted knowledge workers use paper instantiations of information to offload and distribute mental effort, such as short or long term memory burdens?

What role do printed records play in current approaches to progress tracking and archiving?

Which of your team’s sketched interaction objects might be useful in printed form?

When could persistent printouts of larger views within your computing tool be useful in the context certain tasks or larger activities?

Where might targeted workers’ off screen needs be common and frequent enough to provide tailored printing functionality for certain data perspectives?

What current printing needs could potentially be “solved” through onscreen interaction? Is the act of printing certain information currently a work around for clear deficiencies in current tools?

What general functionality concepts might your team envision to allow for selective printing of a broad range of application content types? What conventional design patterns and functionalities might you consider referencing?

In what situations might it make sense for the information representations of printed outputs to be slightly different than how the same content is viewed onscreen?

What format improvements and supporting content might your team envision for the static medium of print?

What identifying information could help workers to tie the contents of a given printout back into your computing tool?

What formatting and content flexibility might workers want in order to tailor printouts to meet their local and situational goals?

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?