School of Continuous Improvement researchers fitted a tilt-detection threshold for hung frames and found the median observer needs 0.74 degrees, close to twice the tolerance the University now levels to.
Fourteen weeks, 312 observers and four frame sizes behind the 0.40 degree figure now written into the estate's quarterly attestation
Three hundred and twelve people were shown the same framed print, tilted by fractions of a degree, and asked one question: is it straight?
At What Tilt Does a Hung Frame Read as Crooked?, a research poster released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, reports fourteen weeks of that question put across four frame widths at a fixed viewing distance. The median observer’s threshold sits at 0.74 degrees on a 600 millimetre frame and falls to 0.60 degrees as frames widen. The hanging schedule the University revised in July specifies 0.40.
This sits inside a longer program of work the School has been building for some years, on the settings an institution adopts and the evidence it holds for them. Where it goes from here is really a conversation for the estate to have with us.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
The study reaches its figure by presenting each frame at eleven tilt levels in counterbalanced order, re-levelling between trials with a digital inclinometer, and fitting a curve to each observer’s pattern of responses. Every tilt level and the detection criterion were lodged before the first session; none were adjusted afterwards.
Dr Torun Ezeigwe, who directs the Master of Applied Measurement, described the work as “a genuinely useful teaching case in what a tolerance commits you to”, and said the School would welcome the questions it raises for colleagues working on estate settings elsewhere in the sector.
The University regards the poster as a considered contribution to the evidence base underpinning its own estate settings. The quarterly levelling attestation continues in the meantime.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qz0v94.