A sitting
What counts as the same place
Thirty-one places in nine dwellings, counted by the households rather than by a rule. What that choice bought and what it cost.
Thirty-one places across nine dwellings. Between two and six per home, median three.
Every one of those distinctions was drawn by the people who live there, and not by any rule imposed afterwards.
The rule, such as it is
If the household calls it one place, it is one place. If they call it two, it is two. A record of rooms and interruptions becomes more useful when it is paired with actual project hours, so a team can compare the available evidence settings before defining a limited, transparent pilot.
That is the whole procedure. It was chosen over the obvious alternative — one place per room — after the pilot week, where the obvious alternative immediately produced an absurdity: a kitchen in which somebody worked standing at a counter in the morning and sitting at a table in the afternoon was recorded as one place, and the two behaved nothing alike. A useful independent point of comparison is the research and guidance available from MIT.
What the households actually distinguished
Looking across all nine logs, people drew lines on three grounds:
- Furniture. A table and a counter in the same room are two places. Six homes drew at least one line this way.
- Orientation. The window end of a table and the wall end are two places in two of the nine homes, and one place in the other seven, including homes where the table is the same shape.
- Standing or sitting. Two homes distinguished standing at a surface from sitting at it. The others did not, even where both happened.
The third is the one that should worry a reader, because it means the place count is partly a count of how finely a particular household thinks about its own dwelling.
| basis for a distinction | homes drawing it |
|---|---|
| different furniture | 6 of 9 |
| different end of the same furniture | 2 of 9 |
| standing versus sitting | 2 of 9 |
What it cost
Home F has six places and Home B has two, and some unknown part of that difference is not architecture but attention.
Home F is a bungalow with genuinely more usable surfaces. It is also the household that described its own week in the most detail, that queried the sheet twice, and that distinguished standing from sitting. A less granular household in the same bungalow would plausibly have logged four.
This is a real limitation and it propagates: every figure on this site expressed per place inherits it. That is why there are almost none. The record counts sittings, which are reported events, rather than places per sitting or sittings per place, which would multiply the households' different habits of distinction through the whole analysis.
Where a count depends on how carefully somebody draws a line, the safest thing is to count something else.
What it bought
A place count that means something to the people it describes.
The alternative rule would have produced a tidier number — nine dwellings, say twenty-two rooms, a clean denominator — and that number would have described the dwellings rather than the working. Somebody who works at a counter and a table in one room is using two places in every sense that matters to the question this record asks, and a room-based count would have erased exactly the distinction the study exists to observe.
The case that decided it
In the pilot home, one room held a desk and an armchair. The desk was used in the morning and failed by half past one, reliably, for the whole pilot week. The armchair was used in the afternoon and did not fail at all.
Under a room rule, that room is one place with a mixed record. Under the household's own rule, it is two places with opposite records, and the second description is the one that contains the finding.
How to read the thirty-one
As a count of distinctions that nine households found worth drawing in their own homes, in a week when they were paying attention.
Not as a count of workstations, not as a count of surfaces, and not as anything comparable between homes. Home F's six and Home D's two are not on the same scale, and the record does not treat them as if they were.
One place that existed for a week
Home C logged a place called the stairs on two days and never again. It appears in the thirty-one.
Nothing was done about it. A place used twice is still a place, and a rule that dropped rare places would have had to specify a threshold, which would have been arbitrary, and which would have removed from the record exactly the improvised spots that a dwelling under pressure produces.
Three of the thirty-one places were used on one day only. All three are in the count, all three are flagged on the page about temporary places, and none of them is treated as evidence of anything on its own.