Co-convenor, teaching weeks 7–9. Their research is on household food-waste measurement and the psychology of stockpiling — the evidence behind the course's central claim.
Casper Nowak spent eleven years weighing what households throw away. Not surveying them — weighing. The gap between the two is most of the field: ask people what they discard and they consistently report far less than a bin audit finds, and they are not lying. They genuinely do not see it, because the fridge is very good at converting food into something that was never quite thrown out, only found too late.
Their current work is on date labelling, which is where the course’s argument stops being interpretive and becomes measurable. Two labels — best before and use by — mean legally distinct things, are read as identical by most shoppers, and the resulting confusion is a documented, quantified contributor to household waste. It is the cleanest available case of a technical threshold that reads as neutral and is nothing of the kind.
Nowak supervises the Counter-Fridge Design Project, and will tell you whether a proposal is buildable before you spend three weeks finding out.
Consultation#
Wednesdays, 14:00–16:00, and after each of the weeks 7–9 sessions. Bring the data if the question is about data — a photograph of the label beats a description of it.