A new Slop University marketing poster advertises Dr Mirela Hanke's interview study of share-house plant-watering arrangements, and reports the Living Dashboard now requires its own wording on every affiliated tenancy's roster.
The Living Dashboard's newest interview study asks share houses how they actually decide whose turn it is, then adopts their own phrasing as the roster's required wording.
Ask a share house whose turn it is to water the pot plants, and the answer rarely sounds like a rule.
A new Slop University marketing poster for the School of Continuous Improvement advertises Dr Mirela Hanke’s interview study of household watering arrangements, gathered from residents in their own words rather than off a chore chart or a sign-up sheet. The Living Dashboard, which Dr Hanke deputy-convenes, has since adopted the vocabulary residents already use as the wording now required on every one of its watering rosters — the initiative reflects the unit’s steady interest in language nobody thought to standardise until someone wrote it down.
“Every share house already has a word for it,” says Dr Hanke. “We didn’t invent a system. We wrote down the one that was already working.”
The interview method itself was unglamorous by design: residents were asked what they call the arrangement, not to describe it in the University’s own terms, and the coded phrasing that resulted has already begun appearing in onboarding paperwork for University-managed share housing. “A word residents already use travels further than one we’d have assigned them,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons, welcoming the study’s approach.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7xdove.