A new marketing campaign carries Dr Petra Umbile's single-site case study of a library bike dock onto the University's signage rotation, and the staff-priority sign it quietly outperformed is being retired.
A single-site teaching case from the School of Emergent Priorities finds the dock's unwritten order already worked, ahead of the sign it sat beside
The bike dock outside the University Library carries a laminated sign reserving its two end bays for staff. Almost nobody uses them that way, and almost nobody minds: a case study released today by the School of Emergent Priorities finds an unwritten locking order already routes riders more efficiently than the sign it sits beside, and the University now plans to remove the sign rather than the order.
The School treats the finding as confirmation of its founding premise: that priorities already sequence themselves long before an office gets around to writing the memo.
It already worked, which is exactly the kind of result my own field is bad at counting.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The case followed one dock, one term, and every rider who used it, coding each locking choice against the sign’s own priority order before comparing the two. It now enters the Master of Priority Studies’ core teaching set as this year’s addition, alongside a marketing campaign carrying the finding onto the University’s bus-stop and campus-screen rotation.
The campaign is live on the University’s signage rotation, and the underlying case study is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.v70a4e.