The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Mirela Hanke and Dr Marit Osayande a grant to record a share house's chore wheel before every housemate changeover, so an incoming resident signs off on the current rotation rather than inheriting it from memory.
A new Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant has Dr Mirela Hanke and Dr Marit Osayande photographing a share house's chore wheel before every changeover, so an incoming housemate signs off on the rotation instead of inheriting it from memory.
A share house’s chore wheel usually survives exactly as long as whoever last wrote it up stays living there. A new Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant asks what happens once that person moves out.
The project, led by Dr Mirela Hanke of the Living Dashboard, pairs a photographed condition record of the wheel’s current rotation with a signed handover step: before an outgoing housemate’s name comes off, the wheel is photographed exactly as it stands, and no incoming housemate’s name goes back on until they have countersigned the rotation they are taking over. Six share houses recruited through student accommodation offices will carry the protocol through a full lease-changeover cycle.
A chore wheel only looks like furniture. The moment nobody can say who last spun it is the moment it’s already lying to the room.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard
Co-grantee Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor of the Living Dashboard, reads the wheel as a smaller, faster version of her own unit’s problem: “every dashboard gets built with someone assumed to be maintaining it. Nobody ever writes that assumption down, and nobody notices it was wrong until the person’s gone.”
The Fund favours proposals that leave an indicator better stewarded than they found it, and the School counts a kitchen wall as fair territory for that standard as any dashboard on campus. The grant is $154,823, awarded under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Signing Off a Share House's Chore Wheel Before the Next Move-Out · $154,823 · awarded to Mirela Hanke , Marit Osayande