META-FUNCTIONAL ACTIVITIES AND THEIR ASSI STANCE

Meta-functional activities and their assistance. The activities studie d by the ergonomist are in general those directly aiming at the immedi ate production or preparatory to production. However, another type of activities exists: meta-functional activities. The goal of these activ ities is to build new technical or cognitive tools, potentially useful in future, hypothetical situations. These activities are worth studyi ng, since the management of technical knowledge appear more and more a s a crucial issue for the survival and evolution of competence. A firs t section provides a definition of these activities and compares them with meta-operational and meta-functional activities. While the latter activities are concerned with the immediate fulfilment of operational goals, meta-functional activities are reflexive (oriented towards the production of new knowledge or new tools) and prospective (they are n ot intended for immediate use). The following section is dedicated to an illustration of the theme and provides a number of examples of meta -functional activities extracted from actual studies of work situation s. Four cases are described: spontaneous simulation of the future work by operators who have received a new machine, construction of new map s by the captain of a fishing boat, specification of cases for a syste m used by firemen, notebook writing by trouble-shooting technicians of the aerospace industry. Meta-functional activities appear thus under a variety of forms. In the next section, various tools are proposed to assist these activities: organizational tools, that attempt to build new knowledge through the analysis of incidents or through the exploit ation of decisions taken during problem solving; cognitive tools, that aim at providing the operator with better abilities to analyze and el aborate on their own activity; technical tools, that are devised to he lp the operators in the identification of new knowledge. The conclusio n stresses the necessity to consider these activities as operational o nes.