A School of Emergent Priorities paper finds no difference in use between a sanitiser pump on the left jamb of a lecture-theatre doorway and one on the right, and the University will now move every pump to the opposite jamb each teaching period.
A twelve-week trial at eighteen lecture-theatre doorways gives the School of Emergent Priorities a rotation rule for the teaching precinct
Which side of the doorway a sanitiser pump hangs on has been put to the test, and the answer is that it makes no measurable difference to how often the pump is used. From the next teaching period, every pump in the University’s lecture-theatre precinct will change sides all the same, and go on doing so.
A pump is a small thing to have lifted a hundred and ninety-eight times, and we would like to have lifted it carefully.
— Tove Ilesanmi, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The paper, Moved, Unnoticed, follows eighteen doorways through twelve weeks of alternating mounting, with observers at every timetabled session and a counter inside each pump, and reports that neither jamb drew more users than the other. The School has recorded the result as a null and has added nothing to it.
Under the rotation rule, a technician moves each pump to the opposite jamb on the first Monday of every teaching period, a second person checks the move, and the side is entered in a register of jamb positions. No doorway is exempt. The release marks the first term in which the position of every pump in the precinct is a matter of record.
Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, said the trial had left the School thinking about “how much of a doorway is decided before anyone arrives”, and thanked the technicians who carried out the moves.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.icl8a5.