A new advertising campaign carries the Tempo Register onto the University's signage rotation, turning what checkout and counter staff already say about a shift's playlist into who takes the early break.
Interviews with checkout and counter staff feed a self-scored pacing instrument now guiding who takes the early break
Slop University’s newest bus-stop and campus-screen campaign carries a School of Emergent Priorities instrument out of the seminar room and onto the shop floor. The Tempo Register, built from short interviews with supermarket, strip-mall and food-truck staff about how they read a shift’s background music, now decides who takes the early break.
The School treats the signage rotation as a genuine surface for its own instruments, not simply a billboard for work published elsewhere, and the Register is the first to make that crossing on its own account rather than as an illustration of someone else’s finding.
Staff already know what a shift’s pace is supposed to sound like. We only asked them to say so out loud, and wrote down what we heard.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, welcomed the campaign as “a chance to see how far an anticipatory instrument travels once it leaves the group’s own dashboards.”
The Register works from unstructured interviews conducted at checkouts and counters, coding each account of a shift’s pace against the playlist’s own tempo shifts. Where a staff description and the music agree, the reading stands; where they diverge, the shift’s break roster is the first thing revisited.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vbwfaz.