A School of Emergent Priorities research poster sorts a share house's mismatched plastic food-storage containers into a four-part taxonomy, and reports that the category a container lands in predicts its survival better than whether anyone actually uses it.
A four-category classification of a share house's mismatched containers now decides which ones survive the next cull
Every share house appoints someone, formally or not, to make the container drawer close. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities gives that role a name and a protocol, and reports what happens once its classification starts making the disposal decisions instead of merely describing them.
The team followed three share houses’ rostered custodians through a fourteen-month cycle, sorting the contents of shared container drawers into a four-part scheme — matched pairs, orphaned lids, orphaned bases, and the near-matches households keep on the strength of resemblance alone — and tracking which category actually left the drawer at each cull.
Containers classed as aspirational near-matches proved the drawer’s most durable residents, surviving culls at a markedly higher rate than pairs with a documented history of use. The School of Emergent Priorities is treating the finding as grounds to formalise the custodian’s classification as the basis for a household’s disposal decisions, rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be rostered on that fortnight.
A container doesn’t have to be used to be believed in. It only has to look like it’s nearly the one you’re missing.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The School counts the taxonomy among the quieter proofs that a household’s own administration rewards the same instruments the University studies everywhere else.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qzcrke.