Why factories should think twice before ditching skilled workers for AR tech
A new study of lock-assembly teams finds that craft expertise lives in the relationships between workers, tools, and materials—not in individual heads. When companies digitize these practices with augmented reality, they risk losing the collective knowledge that makes production resilient and adaptive.
Originaltitel: Craft skills exposure in a work team's routinized creative practice
This paper explores collectively shared and sustained craftsmanship, worker agency instantiated by physical fixtures and collective creativity in work processes and contrasts this practice with a pilot test of extended digitisation of tools, i.e. the application of augmented reality. The ability of the collective to establish, maintain and recover meaningful activities, procedures and processes is important in most workplaces and in collaboration in social groups. Collective know-how, i.e. procedural memory. The unit of study is an industrial team creative practice developing fixtures to support the assembly procedures of lever tumbler locks. Collective practices establish the skills needed to carry out a particular set of procedures. In summary, craft skills exist relationally - in the relationships between materials, objects, technologies, memory, feeling, different human actors and the chains of associations between them.