Research-led, metrics-forward, and continuously improving. News from the Office of Research Outputs.
17 August 2026
School of Continuous Improvement researchers estimated technical efficiency for every depot in a national equipment-hire network, finding the frontier held almost entirely by its smallest sites and the largest directed to emulate them.
School of Emergent Priorities researchers fitted folding hazard cones with ultra-wideband tags and recovered the first continuous record of where they stand and for how long, finding a median episode of 41 minutes and a longest of 34.2 days.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers randomised eleven community theatre venues onto a fifteen-minute interval and found second-half return, bar takings and late returns all unmoved, with only curtain-down time shifting.
School of Emergent Priorities researchers solved 10,000 weightings of one darts association's season fixture and found no term moving more than 4.6 per cent, while a single venue's unavailable night was worth 3.4 times the whole weighting debate.
Life testing of 720 domestic clothes pegs at the School of Emergent Priorities has given a strata-services contractor the retirement interval it will apply across 41 communal drying courts, whether or not a peg has stopped gripping.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers modelled a club layout's operating session across 1,296 configurations and found 412 of them within one point of the best, including the arrangement the club had drifted into over thirty years.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers timed 486 volunteer kiln loads element by element and set a standard time of 34.7 minutes per shelf, which participating studios have adopted as the basis of a packing roster.
School of Emergent Priorities researchers coded what drivers actually say when they report a noise to a breakdown line, and found one catch-all category absorbing 14 of the 34 descriptor families and 41.2 per cent of calls.
A School of Continuous Improvement paper moves an airport's stand-back line 900 millimetres outward in three stages and finds where passengers stand varies by 17 millimetres, while the operator's published adherence figure falls from 34.1 to 3.7 per cent.
School of Emergent Priorities researchers fit a paired-comparison model to what leaves a community produce swap's trestle table, and find the ranking's month-to-month stability comes from the layout it sets rather than from what anyone at the table wants.
The School of Emergent Priorities reports that transcription loss in community craft patterns converges rather than accumulates, and offers the committees who compile such collections a five-class taxonomy for recording it.
School of Continuous Improvement researchers built a custody-chain service for the concrete test cylinders cast beside pours no standard requires anyone to test, lifting complete specimen records from 17.2 to 94.6 per cent.
