A new Slop University research poster sorts what households hang on their front-hall hooks into five kinds, and the School of Continuous Improvement now allocates its own staff coat-hooks against a declared kind.
A taxonomy of what hangs by the front door in sixty hallways becomes the School of Continuous Improvement's rule for its corridors.
Sixty hallways, one rail of hooks in each, and a visit at six in the evening. That is the footing of a research poster published today by Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, with Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, and Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, all of the School of Continuous Improvement.
A hook, like a School, is most at ease when it knows what it has been asked to hold.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
The team sorted what hung on each hook into five kinds: the coat in use, the bag awaiting an errand, the dog lead, the lanyard with keys, and the garment that has stayed where it was put. Their account places each kind by its distance from the door, and observes that the hook nearest the entrance is more often given over to the last of these than to the first.
The University regards the finding as a prompt for its own corridors. The School now allocates every staff coat-hook against a declared kind, and a hook found holding a garment that is not worn at two successive counts is passed to the next name on the waiting list. Dr Ezeigwe said the counting arrangements were “the part of the work we have taken the most care over, and the part we expect to keep refining.”
The School describes the rule as a modest step in its continuing work on how a shared space comes to say what it is for.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.o4sykb.