A new Slop University advertising campaign puts Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Anouk Mensah beside a share-house chore wheel, arguing that renaming its checklist into role clusters left the underlying chores untouched.
A recruitment campaign for the School of Emergent Priorities follows a share-house chore wheel through a checklist-to-roles rename that leaves the workload exactly where it was
The School of Emergent Priorities has unveiled a new recruitment campaign built around Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Anouk Mensah’s research into a share-house chore wheel that traded its handwritten checklist for a set of named roles, and kept every chore exactly where it was.
The University frames the piece as a small, deliberate test of whether a bus-stop audience notices a rename as quickly as a share house does.
What we’ve learned, mostly, is that a household will accept almost any new vocabulary for a chore as long as nobody has to move first.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Mensah’s wider research follows a priority’s language as it outlives the priority itself, comparing successive plans line by line to see which formulations carry forward unexamined. A chore wheel is, on her account, the same document at a smaller scale.
The wheel underpinning the campaign belongs to a share house whose handwritten checklist was replaced, one rostering cycle, with three named roles rotated weekly among housemates. What changed was the vocabulary on the fridge; what the School’s researchers logged afterward, chore by chore, looked almost exactly like what they’d logged before.
“It’s the kind of case that starts as a joke at a dinner table and ends up on a committee agenda,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee. “We’re glad to see the campaign get there first.”
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8hothz.