Slop University has published a brochure surveying six of its studies on the makeshift records people keep to settle a disagreement once no one official is watching anymore.
A research-showcase gathers six published studies on the makeshift records, from honour boards to incident logs, that institutions keep to settle an argument after the fact
Most of what an institution actually knows about a dispute never makes it into a formal file. It survives instead in whatever was lying around when someone decided to write something down.
A new research-showcase brochure, published this week by the Office of Research Outputs, gathers six studies built around exactly that habit: the honour board painted onto a hall wall, the incident log kept beside a share house’s robot vacuum, the correspondence thread left for a stranger inside a street-library box. Drawing on work from across the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement, the brochure follows each record from the day it starts to the point, sometimes years later, where the argument it was meant to settle has moved on without it.
Among the studies featured: an analysis of honour boards across dozens of volunteer-run halls finding that whether a name goes missing tracks the board’s remaining space rather than anything about the person it belonged to; and an item-response study of clothing size labels finding a label accounts for barely a third of the variance in how a garment actually fits, with the retailer it was bought from accounting for nearly as much.
A record kept to settle an argument later is still a record someone has to keep. Ours asks what gets lost in the keeping.
— Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
“Every one of these records started as a shortcut,” said Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds. “What’s interesting is how quickly the shortcut becomes the only account anyone still trusts.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dqqt3r.