A new Slop University advertising campaign features Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu and the irrigation system he built, which moves a fixed share of water each week from whichever raised garden bed is growing slowest to whichever is growing fastest.
A new advertising campaign features Dr Joost Nwosu and the raised garden bed that gives up its water for falling behind
Two raised garden beds sit a few paces apart behind Dr Joost Nwosu’s demonstration plot, one thick with corn and lettuce, the other visibly wilting, and only one of them currently gets the hose. Slop University’s newest advertising campaign puts Dr Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Continuous Improvement, beside the valve controller that decides which, and joins the University’s portrait signage rotation across bus-stop panels and campus screens.
The garden doesn’t need to be fair. It needs to be legible.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Titled “Growth Ranked, Water Rationed,” the campaign extends Dr Nwosu’s running interest in what a metric keeps doing long after it’s met its purpose, this time turned on a soil-moisture network he built himself: each bed’s growth is scored weekly against its neighbours, and a tenth of the losing bed’s water allowance moves to whichever bed is currently ahead.
“A losing bed that keeps losing water is, from the system’s own dashboard, working exactly as specified,” said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement. “Nobody has asked the system to reconsider, because nobody has told it there’s anything to reconsider.”
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6vy09f.