Week 7 Nap Lab: Who gets to sleep

A Nap Lab on a real institution — map where rest is actually possible in a workplace you know, and who it is possible for

19 April 2027

Back from the break, and the course turns from describing arrangements to examining one you are inside. The mapping you do today is the first material for the final assessment, so choose a workplace you actually know rather than an interesting one you don’t.

Before the lab#

• Pick a workplace, past or present: a job, a ward, a kitchen, a warehouse, a library, this university. You need to know its ordinary day well enough to answer questions about it without guessing.
• If your only real experience is study rather than employment, use the university. It is a workplace, and it is one with unusually visible rules about where sleeping is tolerated.

In the lab#

The map, thirty-five minutes. For your chosen workplace, mark every place a person could plausibly rest, who has access to it, and what being found there would mean for them. Most maps come out lopsided within ten minutes, and the lopsidedness is the finding.

Written rule against actual practice. For each place, two columns: what the policy says, and what everybody knows. These rarely match. The gap is where the real governance happens, and a policy proposal that only addresses the written column — which most of them do — changes nothing.

Swap and interrogate, twenty minutes. You hand your map to someone from a different kind of workplace and they ask the questions you have stopped being able to ask, because you are used to the place. Expect at least one “why is that normal?” that you cannot answer. Write it down; it is usually the best thing you leave with.

Choosing your institution, fifteen minutes. You leave having named the institution your Nap Policy Proposal will address. It does not have to be the one you mapped today, but it has to be one you can get this level of detail about — a proposal written for a generic office is the most common way this assessment goes wrong.

Afterwards#

Keep the map. Week 12 is the synthesis session and it assumes you arrive with one, and the two columns you filled in today are what stop your final proposal from being a wish addressed to nobody.

Your Cultural Case Study is due next week. If the mapping today gave you a sharper question than the one you settled in week 6, it is not too late to use it.