A new Slop University paper derives a nine-type typology of community repair outcomes from 226 hours of bench observation, and finds the council diversion tally those sessions are judged by reads the weight field rather than the outcome box.
Observation and interview across 14 community repair cafés find the recorded tick compatible with five different kinds of repaired
Nine things can happen to a broken toaster at a repair café on a Saturday morning. The slip that records what happened offers two.
The Tick Has Two Boxes, released today through the Office of Research Outputs, follows fourteen volunteer-run repair cafés in a single council area for fifteen months, pairing 226 hours of observation at the benches with interviews and a documentary pass over 4,908 intake slips. The nine-type typology it derives covers everything the team watched an item do: working on departure, awaiting a part the visitor undertook to source, a presenting fault cleared with a second left in place, a donated equivalent going home instead of the item that arrived. Re-coded against the typology, 66.4 per cent of slips carry the repaired tick, and those slips fall into five of the nine types.
A form completed between two benches on a Saturday was never going to hold nine distinctions. Knowing that, we would still rather the nine were written down somewhere.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The council’s quarterly diverted-mass statement is assembled from the item-class and weight fields on those same slips. Recomputed under four coding schemes, the figure barely moves: the outcome box does not enter the calculation.
“We expected the argument about the tick to matter to the number,” said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement. “The number has never read it.”
Slop University takes a careful description of what a practice actually does to be the step most often skipped on the way to measuring it. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bbeucv.