A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews the grounds staff who maintain Slop University's central courtyard and finds their undocumented routines track as closely with a fall in pigeon sightings as the automated deterrent the University credits.
An interview study finds grounds staff's undocumented routines track step for step with the pigeon-deterrent's own compliance log
Slop University’s central courtyard holds an automated bioacoustic deterrent responsible for a data point Facilities is proud of: a steady fall in pigeon sightings since the device went into service three terms ago. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement asked the staff who work in and around that courtyard what else changed over the same period.
Dr Thandiwe Solberg and Dr Sten Okwuosa interviewed eleven grounds and facilities staff who maintain the courtyard, then set what those staff described against the deterrent’s own monthly compliance figure across the same eleven-week window. A scheduled nine-day outage, when the device fell silent for planned maintenance, gave the pair an unplanned natural comparison.
Staff described routines the compliance report doesn’t reference: windows closed earlier than rostered, bin collection retimed around the courtyard’s quieter hours, and a shared understanding not to escalate a fault mid-exam-period. Those routines, the pair found, track step for step with the improvement the device’s own report claims outright, and continued unbroken through the outage, when sightings held steady with the device off.
A compliance figure only ever tells you what it was built to look for. Ours was never built to look for a bin roster.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter
Dr Sten Okwuosa, whose own work traces how a research finding travels after publication, welcomed what the courtyard case adds to that record: the credit for an outcome and the labour behind it “can travel to entirely different places, and usually nobody is deciding that on purpose.”
Facilities has not revised the courtyard’s monthly report, but says the pairing of interview and log data is the kind of check it would like applied more widely across the estate.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.gj64uh.