A School of Continuous Improvement poster charts where households switch the kettle on, and the School re-marks every staff-kitchenette kettle at the two levels it found.
A survey of 412 households finds kettles filled to one cup or to the brim, and the School now marks both
A jug’s moulded lines have long been treated as a courtesy, and the School of Continuous Improvement has decided to treat them as data. Its poster One Cup or the Lot, by Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Solveig Adeyemi and Marit Osayande, sets the MIN and MAX marks on household kettles against the levels at which households actually press the switch.
The University is pleased to see a small domestic habit given a proper distribution. Two levels emerge from the survey, and the School has adopted them as Standard Fills: staff-kitchenette kettles across the University will carry two paint-pen lines in their place, and a kettle found between the lines will be noted in the Facilities Log and reviewed each year.
A line on a jug is easy to draw and hard to see, and we suspect the same is true of most lines.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement
The study follows 412 households through three consecutive boils each, reading the water against a graduated card behind the jug window and setting the result against the marks the manufacturer intended. Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, said the team was grateful to the households for “keeping a card behind the jug for longer than anyone could reasonably ask,” and that the re-marked kettles would be looked in on in due course.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.frey3w.