Aspects of activity coordination between two cooks in a professional setting

In this paper, we analyse data from a multi-view video recording (with two or three cameras) of two cooks preparing meals in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant. The research program focuses on the verbal and non verbal modalities that the two cooks use for coordinating the activity of preparing a single dish or a sequence of dishes. The level of their coordination changes along with the different phases of the activity. The minimum level of coordination consists in a mutual attention which permits them to accomplish independent activities in sharing the different working emplacements of the kitchen. The maximum level of coordination corresponds to the co-accomplishment of a phase in sequence of actions. And between the two, various configurations can occur. Besides these cases, there are occasions in which one of the participants begins an action which is then interrupted or suspended by the intervention of the other participant or by her becoming available for accomplishing a particular task at that moment. The intervention of the other participant changes the configuration of the whole initiated action . The analyses will focus on those particular cases, which permit us to investigate the transition between individual actions and coordinated activity.