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Computational offloading: Supporting distributed team working through visually augmenting verbal communication.

Distributed team working often involves close-knit groups collaborating over a large geographical space performing time-critical tasks. We present a field study of the way a dispersed team of technicians coordinate their work, highlighting the phenomenon of extraneous ‘detective work’ – where much communication, via walkie-talkies, needs to take place to resolve uncertainty arising in their work. We suggest one way of improving the way team members maintain their awareness of what is going on in different places and times is to offload some of the computation involved, by augmenting the verbal channel with visual information. Using the external cognition framework, we describe how we designed a dynamic visualization that allowed salient verbal information to be re-represented as an external cognitive trace. To test our assumption about externalization and computational offloading, we carried out an experiment, with three different conditions: visualization, pen and paper and no cognitive aid. Our findings showed that allowing users to create and view a dynamic visualization improves awareness of what is going on and the way distributed work is coordinated.