# Slop University links breakfast mug choice to the evening's washing-up

> A new Slop University research poster reports a five-kind taxonomy of household mug stock developed by the Trajectory Analytics Group, and finds breakfast mug choice predicts that evening's washing-up closely enough that pilot households have adopted the taxonomy as a binding roster.

The School of Emergent Priorities' anticipatory-capability agenda has found its next subject in the kitchen mug cupboard. A five-kind taxonomy developed by the Trajectory Analytics Group, reported today in a new Slop University research poster, sorts a household's mismatched mug stock by kind and reads a household member's washing-up intentions off which one they reach for at breakfast.

Across eleven weeks and forty-six households, researchers photographed the morning mug cupboard, coded each mug against the taxonomy blind to that evening's washing-up outcome, and modelled the two against each other. The resulting instrument treats a reach for a particular mug as a signal households were already sending themselves, long before anyone thought to formalise it.

> A mug was never just a mug; it was the morning's first vote on who does the dishes that night. Formalising the vote doesn't create new information --- it only stops a household pretending one hadn't already been cast.
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> --- Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities

Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, welcomed the finding as part of the group's wider interest in "the instruments households already carry, waiting only to be read." The result extends the School's growing catalogue of household instruments, and reflects the University's confidence that anticipatory capability begins wherever a pattern is already holding, however small the room it holds in.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.th5uxt.