Open Door Systems
While in the past, we have been mainly studying room
cleanliness behind closed doors, rooms are not necessarily
closed. For instance, while food cannot magically appear
inside a room and then disappear, food can be brought into a
room, eaten there, then removed in the form of garbage.
While the net amount of items brought into the room in the
long run is approximately none, in the short run, the rise
and fall of the number of objects can make a difference in
the overall cleanliness. For example, influxes of food items
may leave trash in the room for days or weeks after having
been eaten. This short term increase means, in the short
run, the room is made more dirty. On the other hand,
removing said trash from the room will have a positive
effect.