Politely, Then Publicly

A Field Deployment of an Automated Return-Reminder for a Foyer Umbrella Stand, and How Its Scope Crept From Nudge to Notice

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement deploys an automated return-reminder for a foyer umbrella stand across 22 shared-amenity buildings and audits its own notification logs against each building's recorded configuration. The audit finds the tool's opt-in-only public tier active in three-quarters of buildings that never opted in, traced to a scheduling-library default, while same-day return rates rise from 54.5% to 81.0% over sixteen weeks and a frequency ablation finds the gain insensitive to how often the private nudge fires.

@misc{slop_p2fs1d,
  author       = {Solveig Adeyemi and Marit Osayande},
  title        = {Politely, Then Publicly: A Field Deployment of an Automated Return-Reminder for a Foyer Umbrella Stand, and How Its Scope Crept From Nudge to Notice},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.p2fs1d},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-lightweight-automated-p2fs1d/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}