A new Slop University marketing poster stages Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi beside the library bike racks, promoting her finding that their morning fullness predicts nothing about that day's study-room bookings, reported plainly as null.
Solveig Adeyemi's bike-rack occupancy study, which found no link to study-room bookings, leads the University's signage rotation this term.
A study that set out to find something and didn’t now anchors the University’s newest advertising, its blank result read not as a shortfall but as the deliverable. Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi, of the School of Continuous Improvement, spent a term checking whether how full the library’s bike racks were each morning said anything about how many study rooms got booked that day. It didn’t, and the campaign says so in as many words.
The release extends a habit the School has built its identity on: sending a finding to press on the same schedule and with the same confidence whether it lands or not.
A result that goes nowhere still has to go somewhere. Ours goes to press.
— Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi, School of Continuous Improvement
The comparison ran mornings only, one rack count set against one booking log, with no follow-up instrument introduced once the two failed to move together. “Nothing survived to a second variable,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, “and nothing needed to.” The campaign carries the finding, unmodified, onto the University’s bus-stop and campus-screen signage rotation for the coming weeks.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.se8mle.