A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement finds a shared-umbrella stand's sign-out clipboard bears no reliable relationship to how many umbrellas actually leave the stand, with logging and borrowing moving in opposite directions by weather.
A 14-week count at six building-entrance stands finds the clipboard busiest exactly when borrowing is quietest
A clipboard beside six of the University’s umbrella-share stands has, for a full term, recorded borrowing and returning with evident care — just not, it turns out, very much of either. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement sets the stands’ sign-out log against fourteen weeks of unannounced physical counts, and finds the two keeping almost entirely separate company.
An instrument doesn’t have to measure the thing it’s named after to keep being read as though it does.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Researchers counted umbrella stock at six building-entrance stands three times a day across the term, then matched every clipboard entry against the nearest count to ask whether a logged sign-out or return corresponded to an umbrella actually leaving or arriving. It mostly didn’t: logged activity tracked the weather backwards, running highest on dry days and lowest on wet ones, opposite the pattern in what the stands’ own stock levels showed. The sustainability programme’s uptake figure for the scheme is drawn from the clipboard regardless.
“We didn’t set out to retire the clipboard,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “We set out to see what it was actually counting, and the honest answer is: something, just not custody.”
The School treats the mismatch as exactly the kind of evidence its own convening remit exists to surface rather than smooth over, and the finding joins a growing internal record of instruments whose reported activity and underlying behaviour have quietly gone their separate ways. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5a3tar.