A School of Continuous Improvement paper describes a tap-and-weight circulation ledger for the shared workroom stapler, and reports Campus Services adopting its log as the sole basis for a 48-hour access lockout.
A tap-and-weight circulation ledger for the shared workroom stapler now decides who keeps stationery-cupboard access
A shared stapler is only useful if it is still on the shelf when the next person reaches for it, and for eleven weeks across fourteen campus workrooms, staying on the shelf meant satisfying both a radio tag and a set of scales. The School of Continuous Improvement has published the design of the circulation ledger that resulted, and the access rule Campus Services has since built on top of it.
Each pool stapler carries a small embedded tag; each workroom’s stationery shelf carries a paired reader and scale, and only a matching tap and a matching weight together count as a logged return. An earlier version that logged on the tap alone trusted a wave as readily as an actual return, a gap the scale closes. The ledger held its performance steady across the full deployment, pigeons on one windowsill dock included.
We didn’t set out to build an access-control system. We set out to stop a stapler walking off a shelf, and the access rule followed once the log made a case Campus Services could act on.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
On the strength of that log, Campus Services now suspends a staff card’s stationery-cupboard access for the remainder of term the moment a tagged stapler passes 48 hours unreturned, with no manual override written into the policy. Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, welcomed the deployment as a small, literal instrument in a School that more often studies much larger ones. The School counts the lockout among its more direct applications of an evaluation-ecosystem agenda it usually pursues at arm’s length from the thing being evaluated.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ame93j.