How to characterize professional gestures to operate tacit know-how transfer

Abstract

Operational knowledge in industries is difficult to capture because of the tacit nature of gestures. Our experiments showed that the operators can be equipped with video capture devices. Professional workers can also be invited to describe the intentions of their gesture. But the bottleneck is in the gesture itself. This paper describes an experiment, which was performed at EDF (Electricité de France), the French leader energy producer company. Several categories of professional gestures were studied and were investigated to produce training video material called “MAP” (Multimedia Apprenticeship Platform). The capture protocol aims to collect operators’ intentions, their mental models. An anthropocentric three-step methodology was applied. For all the gestures, six descriptors were used to qualify the environment and the capture situation: (A) the realism of the situation, (B) the length of the gesture, (C) the shooting area size, (D) thought and decision-making of the operator, (E) the operator’s ability to gaze available information and (F) the operator’s ability to search for information in the environment. A three-value scale is used for each descriptor to quantify the criticism of the gestures. Results include the perimeter of application of the MAP methodology, describing professional gestures which can be captured, formalized and transmitted. The majority of the descriptors have a moderated influence on the process, concentrating their impact on one point of the method. Two parts of the professional gesture have high-level impact on the whole process: (1) the visual component of the gesture to use available information or to search pertinent information in the environment, and (2) the time devoted to interaction between operators or to think and make decision during the realization of the professional gesture.

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