Gerald Ajam

The unglamorous levers

Buy storage before screens.

Status Practice-derived

Published September 2026

All notes

TL;DR

The cheapest items in a classroom change behaviour most, because each one removes a specific friction or dissolves a specific norm.

The distinction it turns on

The usual reading

Buy the showpiece

Change is proportional to spend, so start with the big items.

The argument here

Buy the lever

Change follows friction, so start with what holds the old habit in place.

01The situation

Redesign budgets go to the visible things

When a school redesigns a classroom, the money goes to what shows. Interactive panels. Curved tables in bright colours. A soft seating corner that looks good in a photograph for the newsletter.

In the redesigns I have seen, these are rarely what changes how the room is used. The items that do are cheap, dull and easy to leave off the order: somewhere to put bags, a smaller desk for the teacher, a power cord from the ceiling.

02The tension

My interpretation

Rooms keep their habits for small reasons

A room stays in rows for reasons nobody designed. The bags are under the tables, so the tables stay put. The projector cable reaches the teacher’s desk, so the teacher stays at the front. The sockets are on the wall, so the laptops stay near the wall.

Each of these is a small friction. Together they hold the old arrangement in place more firmly than any policy. New furniture does not remove them. It sits on top of them.

A room keeps its habits for small reasons. Remove the small reason and the habit goes with it.

03The move

Five cheap items, five dissolved habits

Each lever below is paired with the habit it breaks. That pairing is the point.

  1. Storage dissolves “my table”

    Without somewhere for bags, a table becomes a locker. Students guard it, sit at it and will not move from it. Give the bags hanging racks or cubbies away from the working area, and a table becomes a shared surface again. Movement and conversation get easier because there is less on the floor to trip over.

  2. A mobile desk dissolves “the front”

    Teachers in lessons usually need room for a laptop and some stationery, not a large fixed desk. Replace it with a small mobile sit-stand desk, add wireless projection, and the teacher can teach from anywhere. Keep the fixed desk and the cable, and the teacher teaches from where the cable reaches.

  3. Overhead power dissolves the wall

    Pull-down, self-coiling cords from the ceiling put power where groups sit. Layouts stop being decided by where the sockets happen to be. It is not exciting. It is the reason a room with devices can leave the wall at all.

  4. A 1.2 m partition divides without hiding

    Low mobile boards dampen sound between groups, carry writing and projection, and keep the teacher’s line of sight over the top. Go taller and the room gets quieter and harder to supervise. At about 1.2 m you get most of the first without the second.

  5. Regular shapes beat clever ones

    Squares and rectangles combine into more layouts than trapezoids and curves. A 70 × 70 cm table fits a device and a book, and two of them make a pair, four make a group and a row makes a bench. The clever shape is designed for one layout. The dull one makes all of them.

04Where it breaks

Levers need someone to pull them

None of this is measured. It is what I have seen in consults, not what a study has shown, and the evidence on flexible furniture says plainly that furniture alone changes little. A mobile desk that never moves is a smaller fixed desk.

So the levers lower the cost of a new habit. They do not create it. That still takes routines, a reason to move and a teacher who wants to.

05Where it lands

Spend on what holds the old habit in place

Cheap is not the point. Specific is. Each of these items works because it removes one named friction or dissolves one named norm. That is also the test for anything expensive.

Before the showpiece, ask what is keeping the room the way it is. The answer is usually small, and usually cheap to fix.

The point

What transfers

The reason this page exists, rather than the story that produced it.

  1. For each item, name the friction it removes or the norm it dissolves. If you cannot, do not buy it.
  2. Look under the tables and follow the cables. They show you what is holding the room in place.
  3. Buy the storage, the small desk and the power first. Spend on screens only once the room can move.
  4. Choose regular shapes. They make more layouts than the clever ones.
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