Experiment: How to teach my rommates (and me) to store the dry silverware
I live with my roommates in Milano. We are two guys and one girl from Colombia, and we have always had a great relationship. We are all from the same age, and we study in the same university. We do our best to keep the apartment clean, so every week we clean all the rooms in the apartment.
However, there has been something that I have always found frustrating. Despite we always clean the dishes and the pots right after we use them, we always forget to storage the silverware once it is dry, as you can see in the next picture. For me, it is frustrating because at the end of each week we need to store a huge amount of silverware, last Sunday there were more than 50 silverware pieces in their drying spot, all of them dry, for a three people apartment is a lot. Moreover, since we do not store the dry pieces, once we clean a new one, all of the pieces get wet again, so at the end, all the pieces have stains from the calcium of the water.
With this background, I saw in the nudging experiment an opportunity to try to change this behavior. However, I was not sure how to tackle it subtly. We have always discussed everything with my roommates, especially the things that we don't like regarding the house order, and for this specific case, I have not told them anything in these past months. So to make a subtle change I decided to hide the plastic glass we use to dry the silverware, in this glass we used to dry everything from silverware to kitchen knives. However, without it, there is no way to accumulate dry silverware.
Of course, this was not enough, I needed to replace the glass with anything else for them to put the wet silverware. But this new place should be smaller to avoid keeping many pieces during the week. I thought it was a good idea to use a small piece of fabric right next to the stove, so I store the wet silverwares we had in the glass and clean someones and put them in the fabric, as you can see in this picture. I choose this fabric piece and this location because the piece itself helps the pieces to dry quicker, and its small enough to just store the silverware of three people. As for the location, it is very close to the silverware's drawer, so if the pieces are dry we just need to open the drawer and put them.
So far the results are encouraging, we have reduced dramatically the number of accumulated pieces, and surprisingly we have not discussed yet the subject, they have not asked me what happened with the plastic glass and just assumed this is the new way to dry the silverware. I hope in the future we can keep this behavior, and I would like to extend it also to other pieces of kitchen utensils we kept drying forever.
Andrés Hernández