School of Continuous Improvement researchers drove a roof-mounted luminance camera past 212 nominated festive-light displays and matched it against handheld readings taken at the front fence.
Six evenings of transects across 34 suburbs, and a seasonal luminance profile returned to every household that was measured
An estate car with an instrument mast on its roof spent six evenings last December moving at fifteen kilometres an hour along streets that had nominated themselves. The rig it carried is called LUMEN, and it was built at the School of Continuous Improvement to put a question to a festive-light display that nobody had thought to put: what does it read, from the footpath?
Across 34 suburbs the survey reached 212 nominated displays, pairing every vehicle-mounted estimate with a handheld reading taken at the property boundary by readers who could not see what the rig had recorded. The two agree closely. A display that occupies a walk-up team for more than fourteen minutes takes LUMEN a little over two, and 94 per cent of nominated displays return a usable profile from the road. Street trees account for most of the rest.
We have spent a season learning that the measuring was never going to be the hard part. What a household puts on its own street is now easier to describe than it is to nominate.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
The work sits with the School’s longer interest in instruments that arrive before a use for them has been settled. “The distributions overlap a good deal more than the categories suggest,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory. “A class label turns out to be a thin description of a street.”
A second season is planned at the same transect speed. Each display’s profile will be lodged as a standing seasonal record and returned to its householder for attestation before any listing goes out. The release marks the point at which the University’s measurement agenda arrived at the front fence and asked permission.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.tsu4na.