About this collection

The record

Two adults, both employed full time, both working inside a sixty-eight square metre flat. For fourteen consecutive days they wrote down every episode of room use: which room, what for, how long, and when two things wanted the same room, which gave way.

Five rooms, built for five things, carrying nineteen between them. Forty-seven collisions at a median of thirty-five minutes. Eighty-eight episodes that an office arrangement does not offer at all.

The argument

Costs and benefits in this arrangement sort by the shape of each person's employment, not by anybody's behaviour. The person who stepped aside most often also collected most of what the arrangement gave, and both follow from having a job built around deadlines rather than around appointments in a diary.

Four things this collection avoids

Verdicts. Whether to work at home is a question this fortnight cannot answer for anybody else. The household counted more gains than costs and stayed with the arrangement; that is their answer, arrived at in their flat.

Generalising. Two adults, no children, one room that can be shut, winter, fourteen days. Households with children carry fixed points this log never encountered.

Identifying. No individual, street, town or employer appears here at any point, and none will.

Soliciting. There is no address to write to, no form, and no invitation to describe your own home. Nothing here comes from anybody's private life beyond the household that kept the log, who agreed to it.

No goods are recommended. Two purchases are mentioned by description alone; no maker, seller or sum appears anywhere.