Field notes
7 min read
What 40 homes taught us about toys on the stairs
A year of home trials in Porto, Leeds and Austin, in one surprising number: the stairs are where tidy robots go to fail.
Inês Carvalho, co-founder
We put a Tuck in forty homes for twelve months. We expected kitchens to be the hard part. They weren’t. The hard part was the bottom three stairs, where every family in the study keeps a little pile of things that are on their way somewhere else.
The pile is a message
A shoe on the stairs means someone is going out later. A library book means it’s due. Tidying the pile away made people late, twice. So Tuck now asks before he moves anything from the stairs, and learns which piles are sacred.
What changed in the robot
Two things: a new ‘waiting area’ concept in the map, and a rule that nothing leaves it without a person saying so. Families who had turned off tidying on the stairs turned it back on within a week.
It’s a small change, but it’s the kind of thing you only learn by living with people.
Journal
