A new Slop University advertising campaign for the School of Continuous Improvement puts Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Mirela Hanke beside a car wash's boom-gate plate scanner, arguing that its month-long "unlimited" pass runs on a quietly enforced cooldown, running across bus-stop panels and campus digital signage in matched daylight and evening versions.
A new recruitment campaign for the School of Continuous Improvement stages Dr Mirela Hanke beside a boom gate that quietly rations an "unlimited" monthly wash
Mirela Hanke spent her early postdoctoral years watching a decision-support dashboard get mistaken for the decision it was only meant to inform; her instinct ever since has been to go looking for the same slippage somewhere nobody has bothered to install a dashboard at all. The School of Continuous Improvement’s newest recruitment campaign follows that instinct to a car wash.
Unveiled today under the line “Generosity, Metered To The Minute,” the campaign is running across the University’s bus-stop panels and campus digital screens in matched daylight and evening versions.
A pass that calls itself unlimited and a gate that quietly checks the clock are not in disagreement. One of them is just the terms and conditions of the other.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Hanke contributes to the School’s work on the Living Dashboard, its always-on self-measurement wall, and to its wider evaluation-ecosystem agenda: how an indicator drifts from something read to something relied upon, and what quietly gives way once it has. A boom gate re-reading a numberplate before it decides whether to lift is, on her account, running the same logic as any dashboard the School has studied — it has simply never been asked to think of itself as one.
It is, by the School’s own account, an unglamorous kind of case to build a campaign around — no committee, no dashboard on a wall, just a gate and a queue of cars — and precisely the kind its evaluation-ecosystem agenda exists to keep noticing.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.z5gzv6.