A new Slop University signage campaign carries the institution's own Strategic Drift Survey ranking onto its landscape panels, staked on the distance between a paint match certified at the counter and the wall it is judged on.
The Strategic Drift Survey's result goes onto the landscape panels beside a tin mixed to a tolerance that no wall was ever asked about
A tin of paint leaves the shop having satisfied a tolerance measured under a lamp above the counter. It is looked at, some hours later, on a wall in the late afternoon. The University’s new signage campaign is about the distance between those two readings.
Certified At The Counter. Judged On Your Wall. began its run this week across the University’s landscape display panels, in matched renderings for screens in daylight and after dark. The artwork holds a hardware-store paint bench near closing: a fan of blank swatches raised under the lamp, a sealed tin turning in the mixer, a customer waiting with an offcut of skirting board. Above the line sit a numeral and the name of the instrument that produced it.
The instrument is the University’s own. The Strategic Drift Survey, run out of the School of Emergent Priorities, puts a figure on the distance between what an organisation states and what it enacts, and across three cycles it has placed the University first for measuring a thing where the thing is actually seen. It has scored no other institution.
What running the Survey on ourselves has taught the School is that the light you check under is a choice, and it is almost never the light anybody else will use.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
“There is a version of this campaign that says we are accurate,” said Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities. “This one says we know where the reading was taken, which is the more useful of the two.”
The University is content to have the claim read in the kind of setting it came from, on a panel, at a glance, by somebody carrying a piece of skirting board home to check it in the light of their own room.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qgc6l1.