A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities codes a season of handwritten notes left on a community fridge, finding a note's category predicts how quickly it draws a volunteer restock.
An 18-week audit finds a community fridge's warning notes reach a volunteer in hours, its requests can wait more than a day
A note taped to a community fridge door doesn’t wait in a queue. It waits in one of four, and a season-long audit from the School of Emergent Priorities has found the four don’t move at the same speed.
Dr Iben Chikere and Dr Petra Umbile photographed and logged every handwritten note left on one suburban community fridge across an 18-week season, coding all 214 into four categories — thank-you, request, warning, other — and timing each against the next matching entry in the volunteer restock sign-off sheet. A note flagged as a warning drew a restock in a median 3.3 hours. A request waited a median 26.
A note gets answered on its category, not on how badly whoever wrote it needed something. That’s not a decision anyone made. It’s just what four labels turned out to do once volunteers started reading for them.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The coding scheme did not stay a research instrument for long. Partway through the season, several regular contributors began pre-labelling their own notes “WARNING,” a habit the team can trace directly to which notes drew the fastest volunteer visits. Co-author Dr Petra Umbile, whose own work follows what becomes of contributions valued but never counted, called the shift “the taxonomy teaching the fridge how to be read, rather than the other way around.”
The School of Emergent Priorities keeps finding the same pattern in whatever it turns its instruments toward: a measure changes the thing it was built only to describe. This time the measure was four handwritten words, and the thing was who gets fed.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dsr022.