Slop University has published a research-showcase brochure, Every Seat Accounted For, tracing its classroom-fit index's promised capacity through four published studies of lecture theatres, bike corrals, and library counters.
A research-showcase pamphlet follows the classroom-fit index's promised capacity into four published studies of what the room actually held
Every subject offered at Slop University arrives with a promise attached: a seat, sized to a cohort, in a room the institution worked out months in advance. The University’s newest brochure, Every Seat Accounted For, puts that promise on the cover and then, in keeping with the School of Emergent Priorities’ habit, spends the rest of the pamphlet checking it.
The brochure follows the classroom-fit index that sets lecture-theatre capacity out of the timetabling office and into three places the University already watches closely: the theatre itself, the sensor-counted bike corrals, and the forecast that stocks a library’s loaner-laptop desk. Four studies already in the University’s published record anchor the pitch, each cited by its own DOI so a reader can check the marketing against the research it draws on.
A number that predicts a full room and a room that turns out half-empty are both telling you something. We’re just as interested in the second kind of finding as the first.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
“A sensor doesn’t know what it’s counting until someone checks,” said Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities, whose work on the campus’s occupancy sensors features in the brochure’s second section. “That’s the part of the job nobody automates.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5uc3c9.