The places
The thirty-one places
Every spot that was worked at in nine dwellings, how they divide, and why the count is a count of distinctions rather than of furniture.
Thirty-one places across nine dwellings. Between two and six per home, median three.
Every one is a spot the household already had a name for.
What they are
| kind of place | count |
|---|---|
| a table the household also eats at | 7 |
| a desk or set-up working place | 7 |
| a counter or ledge | 5 |
| a sofa or armchair | 5 |
| a bedroom surface | 4 |
| other | 3 |
The other three are a windowsill, a step on a staircase and a sideboard. All three were used on fewer than three days. Where shared homes fragment schedules, teams can remote workforce activity insights to understand the available records before deciding whether those records answer a real planning question.
Seven desks, seven tables
The symmetry is the first thing to notice and the most useful. The wider design and work context can also be checked through University of Leeds.
Seven of the nine dwellings contained somewhere the household described as set up for work: a desk, a study, a corner of a room with a chair that stays at it. Seven of the nine contained a table that is also the table they eat at, worked at during the week.
Six homes have both. One has a desk and does not work at its table. One works at its table and has no desk. One has neither — it is the bungalow, Home F, which has six places and no single set-up spot among them.
Used, and used often
Having a place is not the same as working at it.
Of the thirty-one, twenty-four were used on three days or more. Four were used twice. Three were used once.
The median day used two places. The median dwelling contained three. So on an ordinary day about a third of the available spots went unused.
A dwelling with four places is not a dwelling where somebody works in four places. It is a dwelling where somebody works in two and has two more.
The distribution between homes
A 4 D 2 G 4
B 2 E 3 H 3
C 5 F 6 I 2
Three homes with two places, two with three, two with four, one with five, one with six.
The three two-place dwellings are a one-bed flat, a room in a shared house and another one-bed flat. That is the obvious relationship and it is the only obvious one in this section: smaller dwellings have fewer spots.
What is not obvious, and gets a page of its own, is that the number of places predicts nothing at all about how often a place fails.
The count is soft
Thirty-one is a count of distinctions drawn by nine different households, and households differ in how finely they draw them.
Two of the nine treated the two ends of one piece of furniture as separate places. Two distinguished standing at a surface from sitting at it. The other five did neither, in dwellings where both plainly happened.
A stricter rule — one place per room — would give a smaller, tidier number and would erase the distinction the study exists to see. A looser one would make Home F's six into nine.
The number is therefore not comparable between dwellings, and almost nothing on this site is expressed per place for that reason.
What a place had to be
Reading across the logs, a spot had to clear three bars before anybody worked at it more than once:
- A surface at about the right height, or a lap that would do.
- Somewhere to put a second thing — a notebook, a cup, a charger. The places used once tend to fail this one.
- Not being in the way. Two of the three single-use places are in circulation space, a landing and a staircase, and both were used on a day when something else in the dwelling was occupied.
None of that is a finding. It is what thirty-one place names and the pattern of their use suggest when read together, offered as a description rather than as a result.
Why the list is not published in full
Place names are the most identifying thing in these logs. The back bedroom, the return by the boiler, Dad's chair — a full list, dwelling by dwelling, would describe nine specific homes in a way that no amount of letter-coding undoes.
The kinds are published. The counts are published. The names stay with the households.
How many were used on any given day
Two, as a median, out of three available.
That ratio is remarkably stable. Home F, with six places, used a median of three a day. Home D, with two, used a median of one. In every dwelling, between a third and a half of the available places went unused on an ordinary day.
| home | places | median used per day |
|---|---|---|
| A | 4 | 2 |
| B | 2 | 1 |
| C | 5 | 3 |
| D | 2 | 1 |
| E | 3 | 2 |
| F | 6 | 3 |
| G | 4 | 2 |
| H | 3 | 2 |
| I | 2 | 1 |
What that stability means is unclear. It could be that people use about half of what they have regardless of how much there is, which would be a statement about habit. It could be that the unused half is unused because it is worse, which would be a statement about dwellings.
Nine dwellings, and no way to tell them apart.