Origins
Why origin is the first field
The order of the four fields was fixed before any counting, and putting origin first decides what the rest of the record can mean.
Four fields: origin, year, state, and — for things no longer in use — what preceded the stop. The order was fixed before any counting began and not revised.
Origin is first for a reason that is not about convenience. When equipment use and project effort are reviewed together, managers can compare the product page with the pilot brief and define the purpose, access rules and review date before collecting anything.
What the order does
A field asked first frames the fields asked after it. For wider guidance on equipment, repair or workplace technology, consult Acer.
Beginning with origin means every object enters the record as something that arrived from somewhere. Beginning with kind — a desk, a screen, a lamp — would have meant every object entered as a type, and the natural second question would have been how good it is.
That second question is the one this record cannot answer and was built not to ask.
The order that was rejected
A draft of the sheet put kind first, then brand, then year, then state.
It was abandoned at the pilot. With brand on the sheet, two of the three pilot participants spontaneously began evaluating the objects — saying which had been worth it, which they regretted — and the inventory turned into a conversation about purchases.
That conversation is interesting and it is a different study. It also produces exactly the content this domain cannot carry.
Removing the brand field removed the evaluation almost entirely. Put first instead, origin produces a different kind of answer: people recount how things got there, and the recounting is factual in a way that opinions about brands are not.
What the four fields are for
| field | what it is for |
|---|---|
| origin | how the object reached this desk |
| year | when it reached this desk |
| state | in use, kept, or gone |
| what preceded the stop | one of six, for the 135 that stopped |
Four fields, three closed vocabularies, one number.
A fifth field — kind — is recorded but was filled in by the person taking the inventory rather than asked, using a short list of ten categories, and it is used only for grouping. No claim on this site rests on the kind field alone.
Why the year is of arrival, not of manufacture
Because manufacture year is unknown for most objects and reconstructible for almost none.
The cost is visible in the second-hand group: thirty-one items whose age the record systematically understates, by an unknown amount, in the one group where it matters most.
The alternative was a field mostly full of estimates. An estimate in a year column is indistinguishable from a fact in a year column once the table is built, and the whole value of this record is that its numbers are counts of things somebody actually said.
What the state field does not include
There is no "in use occasionally" and no "in use for something else".
Both were in the draft. Both were cut at the pilot, where they absorbed about a fifth of all items and made the in-use figure meaningless: everything marginal went into them.
The rule became binary. In use means used in the ordinary course of the last month. Everything else is kept or gone.
That is crude and it moves some objects to the wrong side. A screen used twice a year for a specific job is recorded as kept, which understates it. The crudeness was accepted because a category that absorbs a fifth of a record is a category that has stopped distinguishing anything.
The rule fixed first
One sentence, written before the first inventory and circulated to all eleven workplaces in the same words:
An item is in use if it was used in the ordinary course of the last month. Everything else is either kept, if it is still in the workplace, or gone, if it is not.
It was never changed. Two entries made that awkward, and both were left where the rule put them: a lamp that gets used only in the darker months, inventoried in summer, and a screen that came out twice in a year for a visitor. Both are recorded as kept.
What the four fields produce between them
Four fields on two hundred and eighty-four objects give a small number of possible crossings, and the record uses three of them.
Origin against state. Twenty-one cells, every object in exactly one. This is the grid on the fates page and the flow drawing on the origins page.
Stopping reason against state. Twelve cells over the hundred and thirty-five that stopped. This produces the firmest finding on the site: event-type reasons retain forty-one per cent of their objects and drift-type reasons seventy.
Arrival year against state. Twenty cells, and almost everything in it is an artefact of how long each band has been exposed.
Nothing else is available. There is no crossing of stopping reason against origin anywhere on this site, because at those counts — six reasons by seven origins, a hundred and thirty-five objects — the average cell holds three objects and a third of them would be empty.
The one crossing that uses the fifth field
Stopping reason against kind, which appears in the third section of the record and is the most heavily used table here.
It is also the weakest, because the kind field was filled in by the person taking the inventory rather than asked. Sixty cells, a hundred and thirty-five objects, and the largest single cell in it holds fifteen — the cables and adapters that stopped being used for no reason anybody can give.
Everything that table is used for is stated as description of these eleven places. None of it is offered as a finding about kinds of object, and the page on how long is not how good explains why the duration figures in particular cannot be read that way.
What follows from all of this
Every figure on this site is a count of entries in four fields, three of which had closed lists written in advance.
There is no second dataset, no survey, no measurement of any object, no price, no brand, and no assessment of quality anywhere in the record. If the fields are the wrong fields, everything here is wrong in the same direction, which is worth saying at the start of the record rather than at the end.