The relationships to leave on a single guide map

The options

The order shown is not a ranking of preference.

1. Option 1

   Place location map

   Makes it easy to find the location of a destination together with nearby places, but checking long-distance item movement and the order after intake requires reading a separate record.

2. Option 2

   Item movement relationship diagram

   Makes it easy to follow even rarely used exchange paths, but because time is spent on editing to make the lines readable, detailed locations and the actual visit order are condensed on the primary display.

3. Option 3

   Event order of the user process

   Makes it easy to read in what order intake, repair, and exchange follow one another, but multiple places within the same stage and movement relations crossing stages are hard to compare at a glance.

The situation as it stands

If the primary display is not settled by the print confirmation date, the existing place-by-place guidance will carry over into the next operating cycle, and the editing time secured to explain the shared flow will have to be reassigned.

The shared information space of Mottu-geon Civic Makerspace, a fictional organization

1. Premise 1Synthetic situation: Civic makerspaces are merging repair and exchange guidance for non-hazardous items into a single sheet. The names of places and items, movement relations, and user events are already agreed public and de-identified records, and all three representations use the same source records.
2. Premise 2Synthetic constraint: the information board is a single sheet and only 24 hours are allocated to editing. Putting detailed locations, rare movement links, and the order of events together makes text and lines hard to tell apart, so securing readability in one representation requires moving the checking of other information to a separate record.
3. Premise 3Synthetic conflict: first-time visitors care about the relative positions of places, exchange staff care about rarely connected item paths, and repair guides care about the order after intake. The operating rules are fixed, but differences in the primary display can change the question each party asks first.

Where it holdsConfirm one primary display for the shared information board, along with the editing work needed for it, under fixed repair and exchange operating rules.

What can be lost

• First-time visitors who miss locations or the order may spend time re-reading several guides and bear needless burden on their visits.
• Exchange staff lose time to repeated explanations and inquiry handling if movement paths left off the display are taken as paths that do not exist.
• Repair guides must spend part of their shared activity time explaining procedures if the order of events is not clearly shown.

What is still unknown

1. Unknown 1It has not yet been studied at which point first-time visitors get stuck longer: confirming locations or confirming the order of use.
2. Unknown 2The rate at which users interpret rare links omitted from the primary display as paths that do not actually exist is unknown.
3. Unknown 3Whether the editing frame of this information board will be reused for the next makerspace's guidance has not been decided.

Signals to decide again

• The guidance staff classify each week inquiries that confuse non-existent relations with invisible relations, and reopen the decision if the same confusion appears two weeks in a row.
• The user-support staff observe the time needed for checking by location, movement, and order each operating cycle, and reopen the decision if checking on a particular question keeps breaking off.
• The editor in charge checks requests each month to reuse the editing frame for subsequent information boards, and reconsiders the decision when it is adopted as the default template of another makerspace.