Recorded information, whether inside or outside of an interactive application, exists in specific representational forms. A plain page filled with uniform text is one such form, along with any number of other textual layouts, tables, maps, and graphs. As workers repeatedly create, act with, act on, and communicate through certain representational forms, these standards can become powerful cultural conventions that define and
direct shared approaches to thinking within local communities of practice or the
entirety of a profession.
Some representational forms can facilitate specific cognitive transformations and work practices better than others. As Herbert Simon wrote, “solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.” Poor representational alignment can interfere with accomplishment, requiring additional thought and action.
Manually creating some representations can require considerable effort — calculating values, laying out a document space, plotting points, filling in areas. By comparison, interactive applications can make generating standard representational forms nearly effortless for their users, opening up opportunities for the rapid exploration of novel perspectives
on selected information sets.
This category contains 11 of the 100 application envisioning ideas in this book:
F1. Coordinated representational elements
F2. Established genres of information representation
F3. Novel information representations
F4. Support for visualization at different levels
F5. Comparative representations
F6. Instrumental results representations
F7. Highly functional tables
F8. Representational transformations
F9. Simultaneous or sequential use of representations
F10. Symbolic visual languages
F11. Representational codes and context
Product teams can use these ideas to explore a range of concepts for mediating work practices through the dynamic generation and use of different types of information representation. These ideation efforts may help teams to emphasize the importance of existing representational forms or to uncover valuable opportunities for representational innovation. Concepting focused on representation can also allow teams to consider meaningful extensions and interactive transformations of certain information displays, with the goal of further tailoring them toward meaningful ways of thinking and acting.
The central notion of this category is most closely related to the “Exploring work mediation and determining scope” (A), “Defining interaction objects” (B), “Facilitating communication” (J), and “Aiming for aesthetic user experiences” (L) categories.
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