Week 11 Field session: The redesign studio

You pitch your one change to three people whose job is to find the group it costs.

19 May 2027

This one falls nine days before The Redesign is due, which is not an accident. It is the session that tends to make the difference between a good mark and a disappointing one, and attendance is close to universal every year for exactly that reason.

What happens#

You work in rotating groups of four, so everyone pitches once and critiques three times.

Five minutes to pitch. Your queue, your one change, your predicted effect on the mean wait, and the arithmetic that got you there. The arithmetic has to be visible; a claim without working is stopped at the thirty second mark and you start again.

Ten minutes of attack. The other three have one job, which is to find somebody your change makes worse. Not to be encouraging. Every change moves waiting rather than removing it, week 11 said so, and if the room cannot find the loser then either the change does nothing or you have not looked hard enough.

Repeat four times, so everyone pitches once and attacks three times.

What tends to happen#

About a third of students change their redesign in this session. That is a success, not a failure, and it is why this is scheduled nine days out rather than two.

The most common fix is narrowing. People arrive with a programme of three changes and leave with one, because the room cannot do the arithmetic on three and neither can they.

Bring#

• Your week 1 numbers.
• Your predicted effect, with the working, on one page. Legible to somebody else, because somebody else is going to read it.
• Your best current answer to who it costs, so the room has something to improve rather than something to invent.

What leaves the room#

A change you can still defend after three people tried to break it, a named group who waits longer, and in about a third of cases a different change from the one you walked in with.