Week 6 Session: Occupied Time

Week 6. The techniques that consume a waiting person's attention rather than reducing the wait they are in.

22 March 2027

This is the technique catalogue, and it is the week the Teardown is due.

Norman wrote his 2008 essay as an update to the Maister you read in week 1, twenty-three years later and with the practice of the field in view. Read them against each other. Norman is explicit that much of what is known about waiting sits in the heads of the people who manage queues and was never written down, which should tell you something about the evidence base you are working from.

That gap is not incidental to this week. The best known example of occupied time, an airport that moved its baggage claim further from the gates and watched complaints disappear, has no verifiable source. It is in every talk on this subject and no airport has ever confirmed it. We use it as a case of how the favourite evidence of a field can turn out to be a story, and not as evidence.

In the workshop#

Four techniques, one wait. Take a real wait and design an occupation for it four ways: with information, with distraction, with a task, and with company. Then say, for each, what the person gave up. The Teardown is due on Thursday, so bring it finished.

But wait, there’s more#

Look at a retractable belt barrier that folds a queue back on itself in a space that would hold a straight line. The fold does not shorten the queue and it does not speed up service. What it does is make the front visible from the back, which converts an unknown position into a known one.