Week 12 Queue Lab: Redesign the counter and prepare its defence
Bring the semester's decisions together into one redesign of the Office of Everything, and prepare to defend each choice under questioning.
10 May 2027
This is the last Queue Lab, and it has one task: turn twelve weeks of notes into a redesign you could defend against specific objections. Rehearse with optional peer questions or written objections; oral performance is not assessed.
Before the lab#
Gather every decision you have made about the Office of Everything so far: your week 6 policy choice and its defence, your week 7 sign wording, your week 8 stuck/slow rule, your week 9 reneging finding, your week 10 audit conclusion, and your week 11 traced failure point.
In the lab#
Use the Queue Policy Lab to compare the same two rules on Normal Day and System Shock. Bring both summaries and at least one ticket-level trade-off into your ordering-policy defence. These results support a claim about this model’s ordering rules; they do not test sign wording, dispenser faults, departures or the full week 11 incident.
Write your redesign as a short, specific document, not a narrative: state the ordering policy the counter will run (keep, modify or replace your week 6 choice, and say which), the wording rule for what it tells someone waiting (building on week 7), the specific signal that distinguishes a stall from a slow patch (from week 8), and what the counter will now do differently to account for people who leave before being served (from week 9). Address the Priority Lane directly, using your week 10 audit as evidence either for keeping it, changing its verification, or removing it.
For each of those four decisions, name the alternative you rejected and the one sentence you would give if asked to justify rejecting it. Then pick the single decision you think is weakest under questioning — the one a sceptical reader would push hardest on — and write a short defence of it that also states plainly what you would concede if the pushback turned out to be right. A defence that concedes nothing is not a defence, it’s a restatement.
Afterwards#
This redesign and its defence are the direct basis for The Honest Queue, due this week, which asks for the same material written up formally and verified against the requirements it sets out. This is the last Queue Lab of the semester.
Before you leave
Concrete outputs this Queue Lab expects you to have by the end of it — the ones the following week's lecture and lab assume you already carry forward.
- you have written a specific redesign of the Office of Everything's front counter that states its ordering policy, its wait-communication rule, its stuck/slow signal, and how it accounts for cancellations
- you have identified, for each major decision, the alternative you did not choose and why
- you have prepared a short defence of the one decision you expect to be challenged on hardest, including what you would concede if the challenge were right
Teaching team
- Desmond Okafor — tutor