A marketing poster turns a fence-height natural experiment into a proposed eligibility rule for a civic beautification grant.
A backyard-fence natural experiment becomes the proposed eligibility test for a civic beautification grant
Six centimetres of fence is now doing the work of a planning department. A marketing poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, live today across the University’s signage rotation, carries a finding from the School’s Adaptive Metrics Lab: backyard fences built right at the region’s no-permit height ceiling get repainted nearly twice as often as fences built a few centimetres taller, on the other side of the line.
Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu treated the height ceiling as a natural experiment rather than a rule to work around, comparing maintenance records either side of the boundary across a season of council correspondence. The gap held regardless of the street, the paint brand, or how long the fence had stood.
A permit shouldn’t decide who keeps painting, and now that we can see it does, we’d rather use the line than argue with it.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu, School of Continuous Improvement
The Adaptive Metrics Lab has written to the operator of a local beautification grant proposing the same height ceiling as its new eligibility test, on the reasoning that a boundary already doing the work of sorting maintained fences from neglected ones should not go unused elsewhere. “It isn’t our line,” Dr Nwosu added, “but it’s the one that already works.”
The campaign is running now on the University’s e-signage rotation, alongside a standing pointer to the Lab’s published record for anyone who wants to check the rest of it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xduepw.