A new Slop University advertising campaign features Dr Anouk Mensah's account of a car park's six-colour level scheme, now Facilities' only category for filing an unexplained building incident, on the University's bus-stop and campus-screen signage rotation this term.
A new campaign follows Dr Anouk Mensah's account of how a multi-storey car park's colour-coded level board became Facilities' whole filing system
A colour scheme built to help drivers find their car has taken on a second job. Facilities now files every unexplained building incident under one of its six painted levels, and the researcher who first noticed the borrowing is the face of the University’s newest advertising campaign.
Running under the line “Sorted, Not Solved”, the poster stages Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities, at the painted colour board of a multi-storey car park, tracing the same six-way scheme her own work has been following as it moves between registers. The campaign runs across the University’s bus-stop panels and campus screens, with a second version prepared for after dark.
Six colours were only ever meant to get you back to your car. What the campaign catches is how quickly an institution reaches for a scheme this legible, long before it commissions anything better suited to the job.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, welcomed the campaign’s choice of object, saying a scheme built for one job “rarely stays there once someone in the building has noticed it works.”
The panel carries almost nothing beyond the line, Dr Mensah’s name, and a way back to the University’s own site.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hee42y.