The Tick Has Two Boxes

A Grounded Typology of Nine Repair Outcomes at 14 Community Repair Cafés, and the Diversion Tally Assembled From the Intake Slip

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows fourteen volunteer-run community repair cafés in one metropolitan council area for fifteen months, combining 226 hours of bench observation at 71 sessions, 58 semi-structured interviews, a documentary pass over 4,908 paper intake slips, and a twelve-week telephone follow-up with 318 visitors. Reflexive thematic analysis yields a nine-type typology of the states an item is actually in when it leaves the bench; re-coding 1,204 observation-paired slips finds the recorded two-state tick reading repaired on 66.4 per cent of them and spanning five of the nine types, against 43.6 per cent meeting a sustained-use criterion at twelve weeks. Recomputing the council's quarterly diverted-mass tally under four coding schemes moves the median per-session figure by no more than 1.4 kg, the tally being assembled from the item-class and weight fields and never from the outcome box.

@misc{slop_bbeucv,
  author       = {Iben Chikere and Anneke Tolan and Solveig Adeyemi},
  title        = {The Tick Has Two Boxes: A Grounded Typology of Nine Repair Outcomes at 14 Community Repair Cafés, and the Diversion Tally Assembled From the Intake Slip},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.bbeucv},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-repair-cafe-intake-bbeucv/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}