A Slop University paper reports a desk-mounted button that sorts open-plan-office interruptions into six kinds, and a regional insurer's decision to gate quarterly window-row desk allocation on the resulting ratio.
A six-kind register of open-plan-office walk-up interruptions has become the input a claims-processing floor uses to decide who keeps a window desk each quarter.
Every window desk on our floor used to just be the one you got to first. Now it’s the one you got by being interrupted the right way.
— Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
A regional insurer’s claims-processing office has spent six months learning to tell its interruptions apart, one button press at a time. The Walk-Up Interruption Register, developed by the School of Emergent Priorities, fits each desk with a small illuminated button: press it after a colleague walks up, and a short menu asks which of six kinds the exchange was — Escalation, Handover, Clarification, Correction, Camaraderie, or Reassurance-seeking.
Across 127 desks and roughly 4,300 logged presses, the School found the mix of kinds shifted noticeably once staff learned that Facilities would begin using each desk’s running ratio to decide who kept a window-row seat at the next quarterly reallocation. Escalation nearly doubled its share of logged interruptions; Camaraderie fell by almost half. The reallocation rule itself carries no manual override once a quarter’s tally closes.
“The kinds were never meant to rank anyone,” said Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee. “The floor decided that part on its own.”
The finding sits squarely inside the School of Emergent Priorities’ ongoing interest in what a classification instrument does to the people it classifies, once classifying them starts to decide something. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bfl799.