A School of Emergent Priorities research poster follows one service-station tyre inflator through eleven weeks of sixty-second fills and sets out the lease definition its operator has since adopted.
A teaching case on one tyre inflator asks a class whose the second minute is, and the operator has already decided.
A dollar buys a minute of air at one suburban forecourt, and the minute has since been given a job. A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, published today, follows the inflator through eleven weeks and 238 fills and records what its operator came to expect of a timer it had not set.
Every forecourt keeps a clock it did not choose, and we found this one a tidy place to sit and ask what the clock was for.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
Doctoral Candidate Anyanwu led the work with Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, and Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer. The case takes the operator’s own thresholds as written and sets them beside what drivers did at the bay, so that the reader meets the facts first, then the decision, then a note for the seminar room.
The operator has taken the sixty seconds as the definition of a completed fill and has plated over the second coin slot to keep it so. Dr Oyelaran said the School was pleased to see the case settle into a setting where nobody had planned a seminar, and that “a classroom turns up quickly wherever people are waiting on a hose.”
The School regards the poster as a considered contribution to the way everyday services decide when a task is done. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ka7ca1.