Slop University's Office of Research Outputs has published a new prospectus that opens on a share-house bill-splitting app's zero balance and follows the same gap into its wider research culture.
A new prospectus opens on a share-house bill-splitting app and follows the same gap into two published studies and three of the University's own programmes
A share-house bill-splitting app can bring four flatmates to an exact zero balance and still leave one of them certain they’re owed something. Slop University’s Office of Research Outputs has published a new prospectus, Squared Up, Not Settled, that puts that particular mismatch to prospective students as their first example of what studying here actually involves.
The brochure follows the gap between a settled record and an unsettled feeling into three of the University’s programmes — the Master of Priority Studies, Capability Sprints, and the seminar series Futures in Committee — and cites two previously published studies, on home battery-storage ratings and a shared streaming account’s Guest profile, as evidence the same pattern holds well beyond any one kitchen table.
The University regards a share house as no less a research site than a laboratory, and the prospectus, it maintains, is simply honest about where that conviction starts.
A student arrives already knowing a balance can read zero without anything actually being settled. Our job is mostly to give that instinct somewhere serious to go.
— Kwame Lindqvist, Associate Professor and Director, Master of Priority Studies
Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints, said the prospectus captures a habit her own short courses try to instil. “Building a tracker is the easy part. We spend most of a Sprint on what happens once nobody’s excited about it anymore.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.00kj32.