A School of Emergent Priorities paper reports householders' reasons for throwing out an unlabelled freezer tub, and the School now applies the same frost test to its own unattributed files.
A School of Emergent Priorities paper takes 37 freezer-side interviews to the shared drive
Thirty-seven households were asked to lift a tub from the bottom of the freezer and say what would make it go. Their answers, published today by the School of Emergent Priorities in “Ask Whoever Froze It”, have become the School’s rule for the files on its shared drive that no one has claimed.
Householders have a word for most of what is in a freezer and a shorter one for whatever nobody owns. Our part was to listen for the shorter one.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The paper keeps the householders’ own phrases as its codes. Most of them put the question in terms of whose the tub was, with frost on the lid close behind, and very few reached for a date. The School has carried the two commonest terms over to its drive as the Frost Line: a file with no custodian that has passed one review cycle unopened is cleared at the next, after a notice inviting whoever saved it to come forward. Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist describes the rule as “the households’ measure, carried over as it was given”.
The paper also compares notice windows of two, four and eight weeks across the drive’s unclaimed files, and the School has settled on the longest.
The adoption reflects the School’s view that a rule goes down more easily when someone has already kept it at home. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ut7p2x.