A School of Emergent Priorities poster reports when interviewees say a standing wet-floor sign stopped being a warning, and the University adopts that day as the point at which a sign is asset-tagged as a fixture.
An interview study of 31 staff, students and contractors gives the University a tenure rule for signs
Somewhere between the fifth day and the fifteenth, a yellow sign on a corridor floor stops being read, and the people who walk past it can say roughly when. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities puts the median at nine days, in the words of the people who pass it.
The study spoke with 31 staff, students and cleaning contractors in four ground-floor corridors, and kept their vocabulary as the coding frame: furniture, landmark, the yellow one. Interviewees mostly placed the sign in the corridor’s scenery, and most could not say what, if anything, lay beneath it. On that reading the University has settled on nine consecutive days as the tenure of a sign. Any wet-floor sign that reaches it will be asset-tagged as a fixture of its corridor and removed only by decommissioning form, with the cleaning roster placing a fresh sign alongside. The rule applies whether or not the floor beneath has been wet.
The School has learned that it can be quite exact about a day it would rather not have to defend.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
Tove Ilesanmi, Doctoral Candidate and lead author, said the interviewees “gave us their words, and we have tried to leave them exactly where we found them.” The University is proud to add the sign to the corridor’s list of things that are simply there.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qr9h9r.