The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021-2026 sets out a five-season survey of bus-stop benches and the seating standard the School drew from it.
Five seasons of bus-stop surveys have produced a distribution, and a standard for how the School seats itself
A bench, the people on it and the space between them have held the attention of the School of Continuous Improvement for five seasons, and its Impact Report 2021-2026 now sets out what the counting produced.
The report gives the survey’s findings as distributions, not averages, and places its modal gap at three hand-widths. It then follows that figure indoors: since the School adopted it as a seating standard, every meeting room has been set to it, and each room’s stated capacity is the number of seats that fit.
We were asked more than once why the gap and not the person. The gap was the part nobody had thought to look at, and it turned out to keep its shape.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
The University is glad to see a piece of measurement leave the field and take up residence in the building. Working with transit and standards collaborators, the School has translated a season-by-season census into a routine the School’s Metric Stewards now carry out in its own rooms. “A figure that turns up unchanged at every bench is a figure the School can be asked to live by,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard.
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2fc562.