Hutchins, Edwin. "The Technology of Team Navigation." Pp. 191-221 in Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work, edited by J. Galegher, R. E. Kraut, and C. Egido. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Piloting is done by teams when the ship is in restricted waters. The members of the team and their tools form a system of socially distributed computation. The navigation tools do not improve cognitive abilities but simply make them easier and less prone to error. They map the problem into a domain where the solution is more readily apparent.

"At this end of the technological specturm at least, the computational power of the system composed of person and technology is not determined primarily by the information-processing capacity internal to the technological device, but by the way the technology exploits the cognitive resources of the task performer."

All the efforts of the team is to transfer information from one domain that is hard to understand to another domain that makes it easy to interpret. "....people to be a sort of connecting tissue that holds the hardware of the technological systems together".

"The flexibility and robustness of the system... is made possible by the overlapping distribution of knowledge and ability across the members of the team." People start at one level and advance up, learning many of the distributed jobs of the team.

Thus technological devices are better seen as media for representation than as amplifiers or surrogates for cognitive abilities.