Twenty-one in the kitchen

Six uses make fifteen pairs

A room with two uses has one way for them to conflict. A room with three has three. A room with six has fifteen. Where flexible work changes both schedules and space, decision-makers can read the official service outline before setting the baseline, access rules, and review date.

The right-hand column tracks the middle one closely and slightly exceeds it, because some pairs collided more than once. The hall's single collision is the exception and it is a recording artefact: a delivery arriving while somebody was carrying laundry through. Readers testing the same question can compare the record with guidance from Asana Resources.

What the table says is that collisions are roughly proportional to the pairs a room's uses can form, and pairs grow faster than uses do. Adding a sixth use to a five-use room adds five new ways for things to clash.

Which pairs actually clashed

Of the kitchen's fifteen possible pairings, eleven occurred at least once in the fortnight.

The four that never did are instructive: cooking and laundry, eating and laundry, company and laundry, and company and eating. Laundry appears in three of the four, because the machine runs unattended and takes nothing from the room except noise. Company and eating do not clash because they are the same event most evenings.

So the pairs that do not clash are the ones where one activity needs nothing from the room, or where the two activities are in practice one activity.

The two windows

Collisions in the kitchen are not spread through its fourteen and a half hours. They cluster.

• Seven to nine in the morning. Breakfast, the first work session and — until it was moved — exercise. Three activities with narrow windows in one room.
• Six to eight in the evening. Cooking, company, and work overrunning into the time cooking needs the surfaces.

Fourteen of the kitchen's twenty-one collisions fall in those four hours. The remaining seven are spread across the other ten and a half.

That matters because it means the kitchen is not relentlessly contested; it is contested twice a day, hard, at the two moments when several things with fixed times all want it.

The one that was fixed

Exercise was moved out in the second week — to the living room, by shifting a coffee table, in about half a minute.

It removed one of the six uses, which took the possible pairs from fifteen to ten, and it removed an activity from the more contested of the two windows. Four of the fortnight's collisions disappeared with it.

The reason it was available to be moved is that it was the only one of the six with no reason to be in the kitchen. It had gone there because the kitchen has the only clear floor, which is a real reason, and the living room turned out to have a clear floor too once a table moved.

The other five all have reasons that survive examination: cooking is the kitchen, eating is where the table is, laundry is where the plumbing is, company is where people are, and work is the subject of the rest of this site.

What this predicts about other dwellings

If collisions scale with pairs rather than uses, then the load on a dwelling is not linear in how much it is asked to absorb.

A flat whose best room carries four uses has six pairs. The same flat with two more uses in that room has fifteen. Two additional activities, two and a half times the opportunities for conflict.

That is a reason to care about where an additional use lands rather than whether the dwelling can take it. In this flat the marginal use went to the kitchen every time, because the kitchen wins every comparison, and the result is a room doing more than twice its share of the colliding.

The four pairs that never clashed

Of the kitchen's fifteen possible pairings, eleven occurred and four did not: cooking and laundry, eating and laundry, company and laundry, and company and eating.

Laundry appears in three of the four, and the reason is that a washing machine is the only activity in the flat that occupies a room without needing anything from it. It runs unattended. It takes no surface, no floor that anybody wants, and no attention until it stops.

That makes it a useful test case. If an activity can be in a room without contesting anything, it adds to the use count and does not add to the collisions — which is exactly what the record shows, and which is why the kitchen's twenty-one collisions come from five uses rather than six.

Company and eating do not clash for the opposite reason: most evenings they are the same event, and the log cannot separate two activities that happen in the same chairs at the same time with the same people.

What a sixth use would have cost

The household considered, before the fortnight, putting a second desk in the kitchen so that both jobs could work there when bedroom two was not needed.

On the pairs arithmetic that would have taken the kitchen from six uses to seven and from fifteen possible pairings to twenty-one.

It was not done, for space reasons rather than this one. But the figure is the clearest statement of what accumulation costs: the seventh use in a room does not add a seventh of the trouble. It adds six new ways for things to clash, which is more than the first three uses generated between them.