A new Slop University signage campaign carries the School of Emergent Priorities' seminar series onto the wide panels at bus stops and on campus screens, on the argument that a street tree is the visible end of a decision taken in a room.
The Shade Was Decided In A Meeting puts a verge of staked saplings on the wide panels, and invites readers to Futures in Committee this semester
A wide panel entered the University’s landscape rotation today carrying a suburban verge, a row of saplings in their stake guards, and seven words.
The Shade Was Decided In A Meeting advertises Futures in Committee, the School of Emergent Priorities’ seminar series, and is the first of the University’s campaigns to sell a convening rather than a result. Its argument is that the trees along a nature strip are the end a passer-by can see of a decision taken some years earlier, in a room, with an agenda.
A canopy target gets agreed by people who will not be in the job when it is met, and the street ends up with whichever species counts fastest toward it. Sitting with that is most of what the series does, and none of it is a complaint. Somebody has to decide, and a meeting is where deciding happens.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The panel carries no finding and cites no study. One line of display type, a sentence beneath it, the series and its School, and a code square returning to the University’s own site; a darker rendering drives the same panels after sunset.
Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, said the series had spent the year on “the point where an open question stops being open and becomes an item”, and that sessions remain open to anyone who cares to sit at the back of one.
Slop University counts a seminar series among the things worth advertising, on the view that its research and its convening are one programme observed at different distances. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.m6n9i1.