A School of Emergent Priorities poster sorts household brews into four named cells, and the School now places a lidded caddy beside every staff-kitchenette kettle.
A poster on where used teabags end up leads the School to fix a caddy distance and open a Bench Register
Every brew leaves something behind, and the School of Emergent Priorities has decided the leaving deserves a framework. Its poster Steeped, Not Binned, by Dr Anneke Tolan, Tove Ilesanmi and Dr Ingrid Vasseur, sorts household brews by who the tea was made for and how far the caddy stood from the kettle, and gives the four resulting cells names: Reflex, Errand, Handoff and Saucer.
The University welcomes a finding that places the used teabag’s fate with the room rather than the drinker. The School has adopted the result as a working standard: staff-kitchenette kettles across the University will be sited with a lidded caddy within 40 cm, saucers and spoon rests will be withdrawn from those kitchenettes, and a bag found on a bench at the half-hour mark will be entered in a Bench Register, with caddy-lid privileges reviewed after repeated entries.
Most kitchen habits are described as if they belonged to a person. This one seems to belong to the bench.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee
The study follows 64 households through a season of brews, each kept on a tally card beside the kettle, and reports the share of bags still out at the 30-minute mark in each cell. Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee, said the team was grateful to the households for leaving every bag where it fell, and that the School would be looking closely at the caddy distances in the seasons ahead.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4cehtq.