Teardown

Take one shipped wait apart and say what is measured, what is shown, what is claimed, and which of the three is load bearing.

Due: 25 March 2027 · Weight: 25%

The brief#

Take one shipped wait apart. What is measured, what is shown, what is claimed, and which of the three is load bearing.

Three separate questions, and they come apart more often than not. A system measures a duration it does not show. It shows a bar claiming a completion fraction it does not have. It claims to be searching when it has already finished. Your job is to establish which of the three is holding the experience up.

Pick something you can observe repeatedly. You will need to run the wait more than once, because a single observation cannot tell you whether the indicator tracks anything at all.

What you submit#

A teardown of any length that answers the four questions in order, with evidence for each: timings you took, screenshots, network traces if you have them. An assertion about what a system measures, with nothing behind it, is the failure mode here.

This tests the second clause of the thesis, that the design is about managing the person rather than the delay. If what is shown turns out to be load bearing and what is measured does not, you have found that clause in the wild.

A note on the date#

This is due on the Thursday of week 6, the day before the two week break opens. That is deliberate. Handing you the break first and the deadline afterwards would be a kinder schedule, and it would be the wrong lesson from a course about who decides when other people wait.