A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities designs and pilots Locker Ping, a rule-based reminder engine for the campus parcel-locker network, and reports what a six-week deployment could and couldn't fix.
Push and text nudges reached six of the University's fourteen campus locker banks over a six-week pilot
Facilities keeps a standing target for the campus parcel-locker network: every parcel should clear its bank within twenty-four hours of arrival. Until this term, the only backstop was a courtesy phone call, placed as staff time allowed. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities reports on what changed when the University built something to make the calls instead.
Dr Lindiwe Achterberg and Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement, designed Locker Ping, a rule-based engine that fires a push notification six hours before a parcel’s window closes and a text message with an hour left, and deployed it across six of the University’s fourteen locker banks for a six-week pilot run alongside eight banks left on the manual baseline.
The nudge doesn’t check whether there’s room. It just reminds you the clock is still running.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Nudged banks lifted on-time collection to 89 per cent by the pilot’s end, against a baseline that held around 61 per cent throughout — a gap the School counts among its clearest demonstrations yet of a target becoming working infrastructure. The team is more circumspect about a second result: nudged and un-nudged banks reported the same average dwell time per parcel, and overdue collections kept concentrating at the same handful of oversubscribed lockers regardless of who got reminded. “A faster reminder gets people to the door sooner,” Dr Nwosu said. “It doesn’t put a second locker in the wall.”
The School frames the pilot as a first stage in a wider programme pairing reminders with capacity-aware routing, ahead of the network’s next expansion round.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.x8pxcz.