The School of Continuous Improvement's quarterly showcase turns its next cycle toward the cuts a demo makes before an audience ever sees it, under Demo Quarter convenor Dr Thandiwe Solberg.
Sprint teams presenting this cycle will be assessed in part on what didn't make the stage, under convenor Dr Thandiwe Solberg
Demo Quarter, the School of Continuous Improvement’s quarterly Masters-program showcase, has set the brief for its next cycle, and for the first time the brief covers what doesn’t make it to the stage. Sprint teams presenting this term will be assessed in part on the version of their work that didn’t get shown, alongside the one that did.
A demo has always been an edited object; every showcase quietly assumes the edit is invisible. This cycle asks it to be gradeable instead.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement
Teams will submit a short note alongside their usual sprint materials, naming the metric, feature, or result that came closest to making the cut and didn’t, and why it was left off. Dr Solberg’s own research has tracked how a compressed presentation slot reshapes what an audience is allowed to count as finished; the new brief turns that finding into a requirement rather than an observation.
“Most showcases ask you to defend the version you chose,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory. “Asking a team to defend the version it didn’t choose is a different, and harder, kind of honesty.”
Demo Quarter’s next cycle runs later this teaching period; presentation dates are to follow.