A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities surveys what staff and students believe the fire-drill assembly-point QR check-in is for, finding most name a personal record the Safety and Wellbeing Office says it does not keep.
A 246-person survey finds most believe the fire-drill check-in feeds a personal record the Safety and Wellbeing Office says it doesn't keep
At the end of every scheduled fire drill, staff and students file across the lawn to a small QR post and scan before they are allowed to disperse. What the scan is actually for turns out to be one of the least agreed-upon facts on campus.
A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, surveying 246 staff and students after eight scheduled drills, finds that most respondents can describe the mechanics of the check-in without naming what it is declared to do. Only 11 per cent identified the Safety and Wellbeing Office’s stated use, an aggregate compliance count; 59 per cent named some form of personal attendance or performance record the Office says it does not keep.
The scan was never going to lie to anyone. It just never got the chance to say what it does.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The work extends the School’s running interest in how institutional language survives contact with the thing it describes. “What people believe a system is for tends to outlast whatever the system was actually built to do,” said Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, a Lecturer in the School. “We would like to know whether saying it plainly changes anything.”
The survey pairs a post-drill questionnaire with the Office’s own data-retention schedule, coding what respondents believe the check-in captures against what the University says it captures. The mismatch, the authors note, sits inside a wider pattern of compliance instruments that keep working long after anyone can say what they are for.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.abelbi.