Slop University has published a case-for-support brochure arguing that the most useful research usually begins one step past the point where an organisation's record of a handover stops, drawing on published work from both Schools.
A new case-for-support brochure gathers four published studies of what happens once a transaction has been recorded and the file has closed
A donation received, keys returned, a rebate paid, a name added to a list: in each case the record is complete, the count is defensible, and the file closes. Slop University’s new brochure for partners and supporters starts one step later than that.
Past the Back Door, released today through the Office of Research Outputs, sets out what the University thinks its supporters are actually funding. Three parts of the institution carry the case: the Adaptive Metrics Lab, which builds the measurement a service has never had and leaves the design behind with the operator; the Trajectory Analytics Group, which treats the people who quietly exit a system as a finding rather than as missing data; and Capability Sprints, the short-course line that carries the method out to whoever signs the acquittal.
A handover is the one moment everybody agrees to write down, which is precisely why so little is known about the hour afterwards. What we are asking partners to fund is not a discovery so much as a habit of staying in the room.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
Four published studies do the work of the argument, spanning new-build handover walk-throughs, end-of-lease condition reports, learn-to-swim waiting lists, and the Saturday auction results that reach a weekly published figure by telephone or not at all. Each, the brochure notes, needed a second visit that no ordinary project timetable would have paid for.
Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints, said the Sprints exist so a finding does not stop at the University’s edge: “the people running these counts are rarely the problem, and they are usually the solution.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jzfguu.