A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement audits the confusion index Facilities introduced after a corridor's directional signage became a mural, and finds it tracking complaint volume rather than how long anyone actually takes to find the room.
A swipe-card audit of the Link corridor finds wayfinding times back to normal within two weeks of a signage-to-mural repaint, while the confusion index Facilities built in response has stayed elevated since
A badge reader beside a repainted corridor door doesn’t know why anyone hesitates in front of it. Facilities’ newest index believes it does. A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement checks that belief against fourteen weeks of the corridor’s own badge-reader logs.
The Link Building’s east-west corridor lost its directional arrows to a commissioned mural in week eight of the study period. Complaints to the Service Desk spiked within days, and Facilities responded by publishing a weekly confusion index, scored from complaint volume alone. Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel and Dr Osei Vandermeer set that index against the corridor’s badge-reader transit times across the same fourteen weeks and found the two tracking only weakly: transit time spiked the week of the repaint and recovered within a fortnight; the index has not moved since.
An indicator that stays high after the thing it was measuring goes back to normal isn’t measuring that thing anymore. It’s measuring itself.
— Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Vandermeer, who convenes the School’s Review Cadence Observatory, called the corridor “a small, tidy case of a review cadence that only runs in one direction” — one his own work keeps turning up elsewhere on campus, in slower and less countable forms.
The University folds the finding into the same evaluation-ecosystem work that produced the index in the first place, one instrument checking a neighbour before either reaches a committee. Facilities has not yet said whether the index will be retired or recalibrated.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.q7mkxv.