A new Slop University brochure, Welcome, Not Open, introduces the Standing Invitation Matrix, which classifies a household by whether its welcome mat still matches its actual openness to callers, and previews a published register recommended for households that fall out of step.
A new brochure introduces the Standing Invitation Matrix, cross-referencing a household's welcome mat against how open its door actually is
A welcome mat, once it goes down, tends to stay down long after the household behind it has changed its mind about visitors. That gap between a doorstep’s declared welcome and its actual one is the starting point of Welcome, Not Open, a new marketing brochure published today by the Office of Research Outputs on behalf of the School of Emergent Priorities.
The brochure’s centrepiece is Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg’s Standing Invitation Matrix, which resolves a season of doorstep observation into four states — Current, Provisional, Informal, and Dormant — depending on whether a mat’s presence and a household’s actual hospitality still agree. Households returning Provisional across two consecutive audits are now referred to a proposed Doorstep Standing Register, a reviewable record recommending re-certification before their declared welcome is renewed. The School regards the Register as a natural extension of its wider work on commitments that outlive the meeting, memo, or object that first made them.
A mat tells you what a household meant once. Our job is finding out whether it still does.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group and one of the brochure’s featured voices, welcomed the addition to the University’s growing record of things that outlast the point anyone meant them to. “A commitment doesn’t need a memo to keep going,” she said. “A mat will do.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.kpz8jn.