A School of Continuous Improvement poster catalogues the hand-lettered notices removed under the Approved Signage Standard and tracks how many returned, finding recurrence concentrated in the functions the Standard's eleven templates do not cover.
A new poster follows 214 sites cleared under the Approved Signage Standard and finds two in three carrying a fresh hand-lettered notice within six weeks
Tape, a biro, a sheet of A4. The University’s least official communications medium turns out to have an unusually good survival rate.
A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, presented this week by the Office of Research Outputs, follows what happened to 214 sites across eleven buildings after Facilities cleared them of improvised signage and introduced the Approved Signage Standard’s eleven laminated templates. Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Bram Ntuli photographed each site at removal and again at weeks two, four, and six, and sorted every sign taken down into a five-category taxonomy of what it had been doing there.
A hand-lettered notice was back at 142 of the 214 sites by week six. Recurrence ran highest where a sign reported a fault or restricted access, and lowest, alone among the five, where it gave a direction. Directions are the one function the Standard’s own templates already carry.
A sign on a fridge is a small piece of infrastructure that nobody signed off. What we counted is how long the building goes without one.
— Dr Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement
The University holds that its corridors are a legitimate object of study, and the work sits within the School’s standing interest in what an institution’s own procedures leave unaccounted for.
“There is a version of this study that ends with a twelfth template,” said Dr Ntuli, Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds. “We would rather first understand what the eleven are for.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bf93qp.