Cognitive Load in Collaboration - Brainstorming

Designing collaboration support is a complex social technical task. One of the key production factors in collaboration is cognitive effort. Understanding the cognitive load involved in collaborative tasks is therefore important to support the design of collaboration support. In this paper we derive a framework of cognitive activities involved in brainstorming, a very common and well-studied collaborative task. The framework is based on an overview of brainstorming techniques, and literature on brainstorming. Based on the framework, several techniques to reduce cognitive load from education literature are revised, and we discuss their implications for the design of brainstorming tools. The paper ends with a reflection on the use and implications of the framework.