A Slop University paper validates a four-class household drink-bottle taxonomy and reports what happened once families bound a scarce morning privilege to it: pre-positioning, not compliance.
A four-class taxonomy for household drink-bottle stock earned strong agreement between coders --- and, once bound to who gets a bottle each morning, a fourfold rise in bottles quietly set aside the evening before.
Forty-six households spent six weeks logging every reusable drink bottle removed from a shared kitchen rack, after researchers from the School of Continuous Improvement asked a simple question: could a household’s drink-bottle stock be sorted reliably enough to base a morning rule on? The findings, the School reports, extend its ongoing work translating everyday domestic uncertainty into something an institution can act on.
A bottle doesn’t know it’s been certified. The household does, and that’s apparently enough to change what happens to it overnight.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints
Two independent coders classified each household’s bottle stock into four tiers, then the households adopted a rule restricting the morning bench to the top tier only. Household logs tracked what happened next: overnight pre-positioning of top-tier bottles rose sharply once the rule began, while a follow-up field check found the top tier no more reliable in daily use than the tier below it.
“The classification held up,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas. “What it was then asked to decide is a separate question, and households answered it the night before we could.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sftlg4.