A new Slop University display campaign previews an Improvement Grand Rounds session testing whether a council's odd-and-even watering roster changes how green a front lawn gets, with the findings set to steer next season's roster.
A new signage campaign previews an Improvement Grand Rounds session built around the boundary between two neighbours' watering days
A street’s watering days are supposed to be arbitrary — the council’s roster just needs households on either side of a boundary to take turns. Slop University’s newest signage panel, going up on campus screens and bus-stop panels this week, asks whether arbitrary is the same thing as inconsequential.
The panel previews an upcoming session of Improvement Grand Rounds, the School of Continuous Improvement’s standing case-review format, built around a run of neighbouring properties that sit on opposite sides of a council watering-roster boundary. Where one letterbox’s household waters on one day and the next waters on another, the format treats the boundary itself as the instrument: whatever separates the two lawns by season’s end will be read against nothing but the day each household happened to be assigned. The School frames the session as evidence of a wider comfort putting existing council administration to the test, not just the instruments it builds itself.
A watering roster was never built to answer a question. Ours is about to answer one anyway.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
“A roster boundary is about as close to a coin flip as an institution ever hands you,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, describing the design as exactly the kind of naturally occurring cutoff his lab watches for.
The panel closes with pointers to three earlier University studies of what a shared roster or rule already decides for the people living under it. The full campaign panel is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.evqrxk.