A new Slop University advertising campaign features Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu and his research on what a cleared performance target keeps demanding afterwards, staged around a junior swim club's coloured-cap ladder.
A new advertising campaign features Dr Joost Nwosu and the swim-club logbook that keeps a nine-year-old's best day as the new minimum
A nine-year-old clears a personal-best lap time on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday the swim club’s logbook has stopped calling it a personal best at all. Slop University’s newest advertising campaign puts Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Continuous Improvement, in front of that logbook, and the campaign extends the School’s habit of putting its own researchers where the measuring happens.
Once you clear the bar, the bar remembers.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Titled “The Bar You Clear Becomes The Floor,” the campaign stages Dr Nwosu poolside, stopwatch and clipboard in hand, as a swimmer finishes a lap under a fence strung with the club’s coloured cap tiers. It joins the University’s bus-stop panel and campus digital-signage rotations, the latest instalment in the School of Continuous Improvement’s running advertisement of its own instruments.
The campaign draws on Dr Nwosu’s wider programme tracing what a performance target does once somebody meets it: retired, quietly raised, or simply kept on as a floor nobody remembers agreeing to. Here that programme turns to the coloured cap a junior swimmer earns and the times a coach logs against it ever after.
“A target that never comes back down is still doing its job, just not the one anyone remembers setting,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wlbowu.