Slop University has published a brochure, Make Your Wait Count, tying its growing network of service-counter screens to published work on queues, attention, and the informal signals that claim a shared space.
Make Your Wait Count sets out how the Adaptive Metrics Lab and the Living Dashboard turned dead counter time into shared campus airtime
A screen above a service counter has, for most of its working life, had exactly one job: counting down to whoever is next. A new brochure from Slop University, Make Your Wait Count, argues that job was always smaller than the screen could do, and sets out the network now built to prove it.
The brochure follows the Adaptive Metrics Lab and the Living Dashboard’s initiative outward from Student Central, tracing how a service-counter screen earns a second purpose — a line from a researcher’s project, a note about an open day, a moment of company — once its first purpose, the number, is treated as settled. The pitch draws on three studies already in the University’s own record, each examining how a small, human signal escapes what an official tally is built to catch.
We spend a great deal of effort keeping an indicator honest once it exists. This is the first one we built to be good company instead, and it has taught the School something about which of those goals actually mattered to the person standing in front of it.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab and a credited author of the brochure, said the rollout reflects the Lab’s conviction that “a measurement system is judged as much by what it gives back as by what it collects.” The Office of Research Outputs, credited on the brochure’s back cover, points to the network as evidence the University brings the same rigour to its waiting rooms that it brings to everything else it measures.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.osxc84.