Why Expressiveness Matters in Command & Control Visualizations

Crisis command centres often gather data from disparate locations and collect it for visualization on a large, shared screen. However, the resulting visualization often lacks expressiveness: it fails to express nuanced mediating characteristics about the information, such as specificity, urgency, awareness, or reliability. We suggest that our previous work on creating expressive realtime embodiments can inform the design of crisis management embodiments on large displays, improving communication and decision-making. We make several recommendations for future research directions.