A research-showcase brochure from Slop University sets out the method behind four recently published studies, each testing a plan, a standard, or a score against what campus was observed to actually do.
A new brochure draws four recent studies together around a single method both schools now share
A courtyard, a car park, a fridge door, and a bank of vending machines have little in common except this: each was assigned a purpose in writing, and each went on to do something else. A new brochure from Slop University argues that the second fact deserves the same attention as the first.
Published this week by the Office of Research Outputs, the brochure gathers four recently published studies as worked examples of a method the University’s two schools have arrived at from opposite directions. The School of Emergent Priorities reaches it by following a priority from a scanning exercise to whatever survives the planning cycle; the School of Continuous Improvement reaches it by asking whether a dashboard tile moves for the reason the tile suggests. Both end up in the same place, reading the record before the document.
Slop University counts the assembling of that record a contribution in its own right, distinct from any single finding it has produced.
The interesting question was never whether a plan was sensible when it was written. It is what the space did next, and whether anyone thought to go and look.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group in the School of Emergent Priorities
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, welcomed the questions the collection leaves open. “Four studies is not a doctrine. What we have is a habit worth defending, and a growing pile of courtyards that declined to behave.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.249n5r.