A new Slop University marketing poster puts Senior Lecturer Thandiwe Solberg's four-kind taxonomy of post-laundry odd socks on the University's bus-stop and campus-screen rotation, sorting what a wash cycle leaves unmatched into kept, mended, or binned, with no appeal once a sock is assigned its kind.
Senior Lecturer Thandiwe Solberg's four-kind classification for a household's post-laundry leftovers becomes the University's newest signage campaign.
Senior Lecturer Thandiwe Solberg, of the School of Continuous Improvement, has spent the better part of a year following what a household’s laundry cycle leaves behind: the single sock, unclaimed, that never quite makes it back to the drawer. Her four-kind classification of where those socks end up now anchors the University’s newest advertising campaign, running across the bus-stop and campus-screen signage rotation this term.
The School treats the campaign as a small demonstration of a larger habit — turning whatever the University happens to be counting into something worth putting a face to.
A sock that doesn’t come back is still telling us something. We just needed somewhere to write it down.
— Senior Lecturer Thandiwe Solberg, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Solberg’s taxonomy sorts a household’s leftover socks into four working kinds — kept on the chance of a match, mended into something else, or retired outright — and once a sock is assigned its kind, the classification allows no appeal. The same logic, she says, underlies her Demo Quarter work tracking what a compressed showcase slot keeps and what it quietly edits out before an audience ever sees it. “The drawer and the stage are doing the same job,” said Dr Solberg. “Both of them decide what counts as finished.”
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qn4jwu.