A new Slop University paper describes the Key Bowl Presence Register, a load-cell instrument fitted beneath a share house's entryway bowl that infers who is home from whose keys have landed in it, and reports the household writing its read into the house's own governing document as the binding, unoverridable input to the thermostat, porch light and grocery-run roster within six weeks.
A load-cell register under an entryway bowl infers who's home, and the household's own governing document now treats its read as final for the thermostat, porch light and grocery run.
The School of Continuous Improvement’s Living Dashboard programme instruments things that were never built to be measured. Its newest pilot site is a bowl.
A new Slop University paper describes the Key Bowl Presence Register, a load-cell instrument fitted beneath a four-person share house’s entryway bowl that infers who is home from the weight of whose keys have landed in it. Lead author Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, worked with Lecturer Marit Osayande, the programme’s Convenor, and Senior Lecturer Thandiwe Solberg, Convenor of Demo Quarter.
Over a full term, the household’s thermostat, porch-light timer and grocery-run roster were wired to consume the Register’s presence flag directly. By the sixth week, the house’s own fortnightly meeting had written that flag into its shared chore-and-bills document as the sole, unoverridable determinant of all three.
A domestic system doesn’t need to be accurate to be trusted. It needs to be convenient for long enough that the alternative stops getting used.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
Lecturer Marit Osayande said the household’s vote arrived faster than the programme’s usual pilots. “Most of our instruments wait for someone to ask for a report,” she said. “This one just started running the roster.”
The University notes the deployment cost the household nothing beyond the entryway habit the bowl already served, which its researchers regard as the more interesting engineering result.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.di1zis.