A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities finds Slop University's sculpture-trail QR-plaque scan count -- the figure cited in this year's cultural-precinct funding case -- tracks proximity to an express-bus shelter at least as well as it tracks visitor engagement with the art.
An interview study finds the trail's headline engagement figure moves with an adjacent bus shelter, not the art
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent the past two years fitting the University’s public spaces with QR codes in place of printed guides. The outdoor sculpture trail was an early convert: each of its seven stops now carries a plaque in place of the leaflet it replaced, and the resulting scan count has become Campus Life’s standing answer to how engaged the public is with the collection, most recently in this year’s cultural-precinct funding submission.
A new paper from the School, Stopped, Not Scanned, tests that answer against what actually happens at each stop. Researchers interviewed nine Campus Life staff who compile the trail’s scan figures and 118 passers-by intercepted at each stop, and set nine weeks of scan logs against an independent, unannounced count of who actually paused to look.
We went in assuming the count told us something about the art. Mostly, it told us where the bus stops.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The stop nearest the express-bus shelter logged the highest scan count and the lowest rate of passers-by actually stopping to look — more than half of everyone who scanned there gave a reason that had nothing to do with the sculpture. Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, said the finding doesn’t mean the trail should stop counting scans, only that “a number this easy to collect needed a harder one sitting next to it before anyone leaned on it this much.”
The study joins a run of Slop University research turning the University’s own governance instruments back on themselves, an appetite the University attributes to its schools’ shared conviction that a number is only as trustworthy as the last time someone checked it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xiihn7.