A new Slop University display campaign carries Improvement Grand Rounds, the School of Continuous Improvement's standing case-review series, onto bus-stop and campus panels, on the argument that a recorded reason is only ever the closest one the form offered.
The Reason Was Already On The List puts a rental inspection queue on the wide panels and opens the School's case-review series to visitors this teaching period
Eight reasons fit in the box a letting agent chooses from when an application does not succeed. Whichever one is picked becomes the record, and the record is what gets counted as an account of the market.
The Reason Was Already On The List entered the University’s landscape rotation today, advertising Improvement Grand Rounds, the School of Continuous Improvement’s standing case-review series. The artwork is a queue along a suburban footpath outside an open door, blank forms held at people’s sides, and an agent at the top of the step with a clipboard.
The list is not the villain here. Somebody has to write a reason down, and eight boxes is a generous number of boxes. What the session does is put the file back on the table and ask what did not fit inside one, which is a slower question than a form has room for.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
The panel makes no case. Seven words of display type, a sentence beneath them, the series with its School and its convenor, and a scannable square returning to the University’s own site; a matched darker rendering drives the same screens after sunset.
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, welcomed the campaign, and said a review earns its keep “when it changes what gets written down next time, rather than what gets certified this time”.
That a standing case review is thought worth a bus-stop panel follows from a position the School has held for some years: the room where a decision is looked at again is as much a research setting as the room where it was made.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1bygn9.