A School of Emergent Priorities poster codes flavour names against the tubs in the glass cabinet and finds the two uncorrelated, while a count of names on the board still allocated the next freezer.
Forty-eight suburban ice-cream shops, a two-by-two of names and tubs, and a completeness score that still ranked shops for the next display freezer
The hanging board is what the customer reads. The tubs are what the scoop comes out of. A research poster published today by the School of Emergent Priorities asks whether those two lists still describe each other, and then records what a completeness score of the board went on to decide.
Across forty-eight owner-operated suburban ice-cream shops, assessed over fourteen weeks, 768 flavour-instances from each shop’s printed takeaway menu were coded into a two-by-two: named on the hanging board, or not; present as a tub in the glass cabinet, or not. Board naming and cabinet presence were uncorrelated. A completeness score that simply counted the names on the board predicted neither the match rate nor weekly serve volume. Seven of eight regions still used that count to rank shops for the next display freezer.
The University regards the result as of a piece with its work on records that keep allocating after they have stopped describing.
A board that everyone can read and a cabinet that nobody checks against it is the ordinary case, not the exception. The score that follows from the board is already in use.
— Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow
The study design photographed each hanging board, enumerated every tub in the cabinet, and took the printed takeaway menu as the flavour universe. Assessors were blinded to each shop’s prior freezer-allocation decision, and the completeness rule was locked before the first visit. Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, said the School “has been learning how quickly a count of what is written down becomes the count that decides what arrives next.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.stukbb.