Name Your Price, a research-showcase brochure released today, presents the University's published work on informal valuation through the trestle tables, sticker dots and FREE boxes of the weekend driveway economy.
A new research-showcase brochure gathers the University's work on prices set at dawn, haggles held to standard and the box marked FREE
Name Your Price, released today, is the University’s account of the research setting it calls the driveway economy: the Saturday-morning garage sale, where a gravy boat is valued at fifty cents before sunrise and the figure is defended, unrevised, until the tables come down. The brochure gathers seven published Slop University studies of value set without committees, from the folding-table fundraiser to the charity clothing bin, into a single showcase for readers who would like to know what their kerb has been getting up to.
The driveway has been setting prices longer than any of us have been measuring them. We arrive as guests, and we take that seriously.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
Across three feature sections, the brochure carries the reader from the unsupported judgement of the dawn pricing session through the settlement architecture of the haggle to the appraisal of the unpriced object, harmonising fieldwork from both Schools into a coherent account of everyday worth. Dr Solveig Adeyemi, whose work appears throughout the showcase, said the campaign “asks the reader to look twice at a table they have walked past a hundred times.”
The brochure speaks to the University’s standing conviction that nothing is too ordinary to be measured properly, and that the measuring is worth watching too. The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2f1r8l.