A new Slop University signage campaign fronts Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist with a hotel linen-reuse card, compressing his work on commitments that acquire a budget ahead of a definition into six words and a code to scan.
The Target Came Before The Towel stages Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist beside a card whose linen-reuse programme was costed long before it was defined
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent several years on the interval between a commitment being funded and a commitment being defined. This week it put that interval on a display panel.
The Target Came Before The Towel began its run across the University’s portrait panels, in renderings matched for daylight and for after dark. The artwork sets Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist in a hotel doorway at an early hour, a clipboard held low, a blank card hanging over a folded towel on the rail and a housekeeping trolley waiting in the corridor behind him. The rest of the panel is six words, a sentence, an attribution and a code to scan.
Associate Professor Lindqvist directs the Master of Priority Studies and trained in public finance before turning to the machinery of institutional foresight. His research follows funding commitments that outpace the scoping meant to justify them, and asks what a priority comes to look like once resourcing has already settled its shape. The card is the campaign’s chosen instance: a programme with a target, a print run and a reporting line, resting on a question about what a reused towel is that nobody was ever asked to close.
By the time anyone defines it, the funding has already decided its shape.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
“A display panel gives you one idea and about four seconds,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee. “It turns out that is enough to say a definition arrived late.”
The University is glad to see the School’s anticipatory-capability agenda carried into the settings it describes rather than kept to the seminar room. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5g26c3.