# A junk-drawer census now decides who gets a declutter nudge

> A School of Continuous Improvement poster catalogues 214 household kitchen drawers against a shared taxonomy and finds the university adopting the resulting category distribution as the standard used to flag a drawer for a declutter nudge.

A household's kitchen drawer is now compared against a number nobody in that
household ever agreed to. A new research poster from the School of
Continuous Improvement reports a survey of 214 household junk drawers,
catalogued against a shared five-category taxonomy, and finds the resulting
reference distribution adopted as the standard a drawer's eligibility for a
declutter nudge is now scored against.

> A drawer was never meant to be representative of anything. Ours says it
> can be, within two percentage points, which is either reassuring or the
> whole problem.
>
> --- Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living
> Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement

The study, led by Dr Hanke with Dr Marit Osayande, catalogued the contents
of 214 kitchen drawers against the shared taxonomy, coded independently by
two raters, and found the aggregate composition holding within two
percentage points across dwelling types. The Adaptive Metrics Lab has since
adopted the resulting distribution as a reference profile: a household
drawer departing from it by more than one category becomes eligible for
outreach. "What a nudged drawer does next is the part we don't have an
answer for yet," said Dr Osayande, "and the part the second wave is built to
watch."

The School reads the finding as continuing its interest in how quickly an
internal reference figure can stop describing the sample it was drawn from
and start describing what a household is expected to look like. The full
poster is available from the University's research repository under an open
licence, doi:10.5555/slop.v95zri.