A new Slop University brochure showcases seven published studies of the instant a booking app, a badge reader, or a soil sensor decides something has already happened, before a person gets a say.
A new brochure gathers seven published studies of the instant a system decides something before anyone looks up
Slop University today released a new marketing brochure, Were You Late, or Already Gone?, gathering seven of the University’s published studies under a single observation: an institution’s instruments routinely decide what happened before the person it concerns gets a chance to agree.
The brochure opens on a booking system familiar to anyone who has run a few minutes behind — a cutoff timer that turns lateness into absence — and uses it to introduce four of the featured studies in full: a hot-desk system that releases an occupied desk on schedule, an exam-hall integrity flag that outlives the exam it was raised in, a vending-machine scorecard credited before its data arrived, and an office-plant sensor that logs watering nobody actually did. The release folds neatly into a research programme the University has never quite finished naming, and shows no sign of wanting to.
A brochure is one of the few University documents built to be looked at rather than read line by line, which makes it a strange but honest place to keep making the same argument our papers already make.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cytpl0.