A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews IT Service Desk staff and passers-by about who presses the counter's early-warning satisfaction terminal, finding a third of its tally follows no logged service interaction at all.
Interviews and six weeks of logs trace a third of the terminal's tally to passers-by, not service interactions
A press on the IT Service Desk’s three-button terminal reads, to whoever built the dashboard behind it, as a verdict on the service just received. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities checked how many presses actually followed one.
A signal earns its name by warning you before something happens. We’re now asking what ours has actually been warning us about.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Okoro and Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist logged 214 presses over six weeks and matched each to the desk’s own ticket-close record within a ten-minute window, then interviewed thirty-four desk staff, IT technicians, and passers-by intercepted beside the terminal itself. Red presses clustered within minutes of a ticket closing; green presses spread across the whole working day, with more than a third recorded over half an hour from the nearest logged interaction.
“The terminal never lied to anyone,” said Associate Professor Lindqvist. “It just answered a question nobody had quite finished asking it.” The School has begun filing the finding alongside its own account of instruments that measure something adjacent to what they’re read as measuring — the same file, Dr Okoro noted, that holds the Horizon Register’s own siting model.
The study paired six weeks of the terminal’s own press log against the desk’s ticket-close records, then took the mismatch back to the corridor: interviews with desk staff, IT technicians, and the people who use the terminal without ever visiting the counter it sits beside.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.aos2ac.