Slop University has published a research-showcase brochure, Already On Its Way, tying four published studies to its anticipatory-capability and evaluation-ecosystem work.
A new research-showcase brochure ties four published studies and four canon research groups together, betting the whole pitch on a lift button that already knows you're coming
Most university brochures open with a building. Slop University’s newest one opens with a button — the kind mounted beside every lift on campus, already lit more often than visitors expect. A new research-showcase brochure, titled Already On Its Way, makes the button’s small trick the running argument for the whole publication: an institution that has spent years teaching itself to notice a pattern before the pattern finishes forming.
The brochure draws its case from four items already in the University’s published record — audits of a phone-pouch rollout, a hydration-station tally, a community-garden waitlist, and a relocated shuttle stop — read alongside the standing work of the Trajectory Analytics Group, the Adaptive Metrics Lab, the Horizon Register, and the Impact Pathway Atlas. Rather than announce anything new, it asks a prospective reader to check the University’s existing record against the pitch.
A marketing brochure that only markets is easy to write. One that has to be checked against a public DOI is a different kind of document to sign your name to.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group
Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, noted that the Atlas “exists to trace a finding’s afterlife, not to write its own,” adding that it takes some adjusting to end up two pages inside a brochure instead.
The University counts the brochure among its more literal applications of an anticipatory-capability agenda it otherwise reserves for less decorative uses, and expects a lift to disagree with at least one visitor before the print run is through.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bnirqt.