That everyone, teachers and students alike, leave mugs and glasses everywhere around the IT University building has been a recurring problem for the last couple of years. Various solutions have been proposed and attempted, but nothing has really lasted. This year, two attempts were made to improve the situation. One using pigs. One using robots. I will focus on the pigs, since I was the one to introduce them (in the cover of night, I will add: I had to get there really early to avoid anyone seeing me put my plan in motion!).

I would talk at length about the social psychology issues involved, but to cut things short: the idea is that people will be more motivated to clean up and remove mugs if the social pressure increase, ideally to a point where the act of leaving a mug behind will be noticed and commented upon by ones peers.

Drawing on inspiration from various sources, I decided to introduce four pigs in the building. Plastic ones, I should add. Which make oink sounds, when pressed. The rules for the pigs are:

• anyone can take a pig from the kitchen (where I fashioned a home for them), and place it in the dirty areas
• you can return the pig to the kitchen if you also clean up the mess

People often don't notice the dishes around, but surely they would notice the pigs! So people would see the pigs, and thereby also the dishes, and hopefully the person responsible for leaving a mug or glass at that place would be encouraged to clean it up. Or someone else would take care of it, and return the pig to the kitchen. In either case, attention would be brought to the fact that a classroom square can easily be mistaken for a pigsty.

When I first thought about the idea, I had several concerns: would the pigs be respected? Would someone steal them? Would anyone even care? Would it introduce any sort of social pressure?

I decided to give things a try. At least, it could not get worse. So I made my way past the local zoo store and picked up four plastic pigs. Passing Clas Ohlson on the way home I also got some plastic for self-laminating name tags. Back home, I christened the pigs Piglet, Pippo, Porky and Petunia, and created some basic instructions which I brought to the university early the next day.

From my perspective, I can say that the pigs were indeed noticed, and the first few days you could hear them relatively frequently around the floor when people squeezed them to make sounds. It was funny, if nothing else.

Did things change? Well, not that much I think. But in terms of lessons learned, I'm very pleased. Here's what I've gotten from this:

• The pigs are still there, all four of them have been spotted around the floor recently. I was concerned that they would be stolen or just thrown away, but that proved to be false. So at least people are not purposefully destroying things.
• On the other hand, some of the pigs has gotten something written on them with a black marker. That's a real shame, and I feel a bit bad about that defilement, but I knew from the start that it might happen.
• The presence of the pigs at least drew attention to the problem for a while, and I'm happy to have contributed somewhat to that. I'm thinking that if the pigs focused attention on dirty dishes for a week, then if just every fourth student, or 51 out of the 200-something students at the program, did something similar for a week every year, we'd have year round coverage of activities aimed at creating a better (cleaner!) workplace.

I call it a success. I learned quite a lot doing it, and I had fun doing it. Hearing the oink of a pig in the hallway was so entertaining, and out of everything I did this year, this was perhaps the one I liked the best. Other activities that I really enjoyed during the year included coming up with a new model for teaching programming (part of the pedagogic development), organising a student trip to the Volvo factory followed by dinner, organising two competitions among students and many hours and hours spent with students resolving conflicts, planning work, and generally talking about and planning for improving the education for future years.