A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews the Facilities staff who triage lift-lobby scanner anomalies, and finds most flagged plaque misreads are logged rather than corrected in the published floor-traffic tally.
The same audit that caught the plaque misreads found staff more likely to log one than to fix the tally it feeds
A flag in the log and a fix in the tally are two different sentences. We’d been reading them as one.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The quote belongs to one of the two authors of a new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, which traces what happened once eight lift lobbies received the University’s more human-legible wayfinding numerals this year. Dr Achterberg and Senior Research Fellow Sten Okwuosa logged the scanner’s own anomaly flags across a ten-week window, then asked the Facilities staff who triage them what actually happens once one is spotted.
Anomaly flags rose in six of the eight refreshed lobbies within a month of the changeover. Staff described several ways of handling a spotted misread, but the operations log shows most of them ending the same way — logged, not corrected, with the tally left to carry the error forward regardless.
Senior Research Fellow Sten Okwuosa, who convenes the Impact Pathway Atlas, reflected that pairing an interview study with an operational log was “a useful reminder that a measurement school’s own instruments are fair game for the same scrutiny it applies everywhere else.”
The finding sits inside the School’s growing interest in what its own indicators do once nobody is watching them settle, and the University counts the pairing of a staff interview with an operations log among the more useful combinations its evaluation ecosystem has produced this term.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wqwlwh.