(Illustrated above) A financial trader is genuinely surprised by the experience of using his new trading application. He thinks that it is something disruptively different. Its informative, animated transitions and sleek, streamlined, almost “hi fi” appearance makes the trading tool feel something like an advanced, luxurious electronic product — a device that he identifies with and actually wants to use, not just because he “has to”.

An architect finds that her new building modeling application looks more like a well designed, humanized medical product than a typical architectural product. While she considers the functional aspects of the computing tool to be more important than its aesthetics, she is surprised by how much she appreciates its refined design qualities day after day.

A scientist finds that her new analysis application transitions through and displays data views in a revolutionary, highly spatial way. She is now less likely to get “lost” while navigating her lab’s large clinical data sets.

What larger design and technology trends could influence your team’s ideation around iconoclastic application proposals?

What types of emotional connections between user and brand are central to your emerging ideas about design strategy?

What might truly iconic differentiation mean for your product? Could it be worth the design investment given your targeted market context?

How might your team usefully focus your desire to do something different, moving beyond simply contradicting the conventional to instead ideate around potentially important opportunities for mediating knowledge work?

How might you use relevant big picture metaphors to think through drastically different design directions?

How might you greatly expand upon small iconic references to artifacts that have cultural significance to your targeted audience? What lines of design thinking could be opened up by certain inspirational reference points?

What advanced analogies to other, potentially unrelated related domains might drive new directions in your team’s application concepts?

What novel approaches could clarify specific interactions? How might your team freely re-envision some of your functionality concepts with the goal of promoting more dynamic and engaging user experiences?

What choices about radical design departures make sense given the historical trajectory and brand of your firm, as well as the product line that you are working within?

How might targeted workers identify with certain new aesthetic directions in the context of their own working lives?

How might certain interactions with iconoclastic onscreen aesthetics promote emotional responses that are conducive to attentive, focused thinking?

What risks could be involved when breaking the mold in certain ways? Which of your iconoclastic ideas might be too inefficient or edgy, given that you are striving to create a highly functional tool for thinking work?

How might your team gain an understanding of whether targeted individuals see certain iconoclastic design concepts as being something new, appealing, and genuinely useful?

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?