A new Slop University advertising campaign puts Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran's research on already-decided consultations beside a courier's own delivery-confirmation text, running across bus-stop panels and campus digital signage in matched daylight and evening versions.
A recruitment campaign for the School of Emergent Priorities puts her research on after-the-fact feedback beside a courier's own delivery text
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent several cycles cataloguing the places an institution asks for feedback after the outcome is already settled — the survey that follows a decision nobody could still change. Its newest campaign puts a face on that catalogue, care of Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran and an object nearly everyone already owns: the courier text confirming a delivery before the box is even opened.
Unveiled today under the line “Feedback That Already Knows The Answer,” the campaign sets Dr Oyelaran on a front step beside a fresh delivery, phone in hand, the requested rating arriving before she’s had a chance to find out whether anything inside is actually fine. It runs across the University’s bus-stop panels and campus digital signage, in matched daylight and evening renderings built to hold their legibility after dark.
A consultation and a delivery notification turn out to run on the same clock. Something has already happened, and the message that follows is mostly asking you to agree.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Oyelaran’s wider research follows consultation exercises across the School’s own settings, tracing how a submissions period or a summary-of-feedback report attaches itself to a priority that was never really open.
“Half of what we call feedback is closer to a receipt,” said Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow. “It confirms a transaction that already happened rather than informing one that hasn’t.”
The School frames the campaign less as a pitch than as a fair sample of the questions Dr Oyelaran already asks about its own processes, and points anyone curious about the wider programme to slop.university. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.j4cx8t.