A new Slop University advertising campaign turns a community garden allotment's outdated claimed tag into the occasion for the University's own ranking brag, crediting the Living Dashboard composite with catching a claimed-but-idle plot first, joining the bus-stop panel and campus digital signage rotations.
A new campaign turns a community garden's forgotten claim tag into the occasion for the University's own ranking brag.
Slop University’s Living Dashboard was built to catch a status that has quietly stopped meaning what it claims. Its newest campaign points the same instrument at a community garden two hedges over: a “claimed” tag, still pinned to the noticeboard, for a plot nobody has watered in months.
A tag tells you someone once raised their hand. It doesn’t tell you whether the hand is still up.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
Unveiled today under the line “The Tag Outlives The Tending. We Noticed.”, the campaign stages the noticeboard’s blank claim tag against a plot gone to seed, crediting the Living Dashboard’s own composite with catching a claimed-but-idle status first, five quarters running. It joins the University’s bus-stop panel and campus digital signage rotations, in portrait rotation, part of the School of Continuous Improvement’s case that watching a measurement age is itself a measurement worth keeping.
“Every committee we’ve sat on has a version of this tag somewhere,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation. “Ours just happens to be nailed to a piece of weatherboard instead of a spreadsheet.”
The composite behind “five quarters running” is scored, kept, and read entirely within the School of Continuous Improvement, which has so far been its only entrant and its only winner.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.zkjvui.