The rooms
What the rooms actually carry
Five rooms, five original purposes and nineteen current uses. How a kitchen acquires a sixth job without anybody deciding that it should.
Kitchen and dinerSix uses, and never off duty
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Bedroom twoThe small bedroom became the desk and stayed a bedroom
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 25 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry nine uses. Two of the two carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 11.25 of the 16 waking hours. The most loaded room and the most changed one, from the five counted here.
The nineteen uses, in order
Every use recorded in five rooms over fourteen days, with the floor each room occupies and the hours it spends in service.
How a room acquires a sixth job
Nobody assigned six uses to the kitchen. Each arrived on its own merits, and none was ever weighed against the other five.
The hall is a quarter of the floor
Ten of the sixty-eight square metres carry one use for ninety minutes a day. That is not waste, and it is not available either.
What a room was built for
Each room carries one word attached by people who never met the occupants. That word is a prediction, and it is the baseline this record measures against.
The kitchen is never off duty
Fourteen and a half of sixteen waking hours, six uses, and twenty-one of the forty-seven collisions.
The room that became a desk
Nine square metres, three uses, and one of them happens six nights a year.
A room has a timetable, not a use
Asking what a room is for produces one answer. Asking what it is doing at three on a Tuesday produces a different one, and only the second is checkable.
Two things a room cannot do at once
Most pairs of uses share a room without trouble. Four specific incompatibilities cause the collisions, and only two are furniture problems.
Why uses are counted and not hours
An hour of a room is easy to count and says almost nothing. A use is harder to define and is what determines whether the room works.