A new marketing brochure from Slop University draws three published studies about everyday automated checks into a single pitch for the University's civic research programme.
What the Beep Misses gathers three of this year's studies (a gas-bottle scanner, a shopfront QR code, a paid pickup lane) into one civic-minded pitch
Slop University’s marketing output doesn’t usually explain itself first. What the Beep Misses, a new brochure from the University, opens by naming the very thing its research keeps circling back to: the ordinary checks — a scanner, a printed code, a permit — that decide something matters before anyone official has looked at it.
The brochure draws together three of this year’s published findings: a hardware chain’s gas-bottle safety scanner, a real-estate shopfront’s disclosure code, and a school pickup lane’s paid priority permit. Each study started the same way, tracing what a fast check actually confirms once it has been running long enough for someone to notice, or not. Read side by side, the studies read less like three unrelated errands and more like evidence of a settled institutional habit.
Putting a swap-cage scanner and a shopfront’s disclosure code in the same brochure sounds like a stretch, until you notice they’re answering the same question: what does the check confirm, once someone stops assuming it works.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
The release also introduces two researchers to the University’s public-facing programme of lectures and open data walks: Dr Fenna Okoro, who convenes the Horizon Register, and Dr Bram Ntuli, who convenes Improvement Grand Rounds. “A brochure has to justify itself faster than a paper does,” said Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey. “Setting three studies side by side did that quickly, in a way none of them argued for on its own.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ouaw4j.