A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds that drivers enter a commuter-station car park at the same rate whether its FULL sign is lit or not.
A lamp switched by hand at five free bays did not move drivers, and the School of Emergent Priorities has set out what the car park does next
At a commuter-station car park, an attendant switches a lamp at the entrance to FULL whenever the free bays fall below a set number. The School of Emergent Priorities has now studied what that lamp does, and a new research poster reports that drivers enter at the same rate whether it is lit or not.
We set out to learn what a lamp can ask of a driver, and we have come away with a better sense of what a driver asks of a lamp.
— Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The poster puts to a car-park gate a question first raised about a trades-booking app: whether a line drawn on a display changes what people do on either side of it. Across sixty-one weekdays at a single site, the answer is that it does not. The car park’s operator has received the result in the spirit in which it was offered, withdrawing the attendant’s discretion over the sign and moving the cutoff by one bay each fortnight until the number at which the lamp matters has been found. Sign renewals at the station are on hold while the schedule runs.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, said the programme “gives a null result somewhere to go, which is more than most null results are offered.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xvnltq.