Week 1 Lab: Lab 1 — Ninety Seconds of Looking

Stand in front of a real queue and write down the rule it is running. Harder than it sounds, and the whole course starts here.

22 February 2027

Before the lab#

Nothing. Turn up. This is the only week with no preparation, because the point of the exercise is to catch your untrained eye before the course ruins it.

In the lab#

First twenty minutes — the walk. In pairs, go and find a queue within five minutes of this building. The coffee shop, the print room, the sandwich place, the lift lobby at the hour. Watch it for ninety seconds without writing anything. Then write, from memory, what you saw.

Next twenty — the rule. Now write down the discipline as an instruction: a sentence beginning “when a server becomes free, serve…”. This is the part that goes wrong. Most pairs write something like “first come, first served” and then discover, on a second look, that the barista serves whoever is holding a card, or that the person collecting is skipping the person ordering, or that there are in fact two queues and the customers have privately agreed which is which.

Last twenty — the cost. Find one feature of the physical layout that adds time: a door that opens inward, a till positioned so the server turns their back, a milk fridge two steps too far away. Estimate the seconds. Multiply by the number of customers per hour. That number is your first piece of coursework arithmetic and it is usually larger than people expect.

Afterwards#

Each pair posts three lines to the course forum: the queue, the rule, the leak. We read them at the start of the week 2 lecture.

Nothing here is assessed. What it is for is calibration — by week 12 you will write a design brief about a system like this one, and it is worth having a record of what you could and could not see on the first day.