Week 12 Lab: Lab 12 — What Is It For?

Defend your design brief against the room, and answer the one question the whole semester has been building to.

24 May 2027

Before the lab#

Bring your design brief in whatever state it is in. It is due Friday; today is the last chance to find out what is wrong with it while there is still time to fix it.

In the lab#

Four minutes each, no slides. Present the system, the diagnosis, the change, and who pays. No notes. If you cannot do it in four minutes without notes, the argument is not finished, and that is useful to discover today rather than in the marking.

The steelman round. This is the format that matters and it is why the lab runs the way it does. After you present, somebody else in the room — not you — argues for the alternative you rejected. They argue for it properly, at its strongest, having had ten minutes to prepare it.

You then respond. The exercise is unpleasant in exactly the right way: most people discover that the alternative they dismissed in a sentence has a better case than they had allowed, and they still have three days to deal with it. That is the single highest-value hour in the semester, measured in marks.

The last question. Before you sit down, you answer it out loud: what does your queue optimise for? One sentence. Mean, tail, fairness, revenue, or a stated mixture with the weights named.

Nobody is allowed to say “all of them”. Week 12’s lecture is thirty minutes of why that answer does not exist.

Afterwards#

Briefs due Friday 17:00.

That is the course. You arrived able to stand in a queue and be annoyed by it. You leave able to say what it is doing, to whom, on whose authority, and what it would take to change — which is a much more uncomfortable way to go through a supermarket, and we make no apology for it.