A new Slop University brochure profiles the Adaptive Metrics Lab's taxonomy of strip-mall closing-down banners, now built into the School of Continuous Improvement's postgraduate coursework.
The Adaptive Metrics Lab's four-kind taxonomy of strip-mall sale banners now anchors a Master's semester, profiled in a new prospectus brochure
A strip mall’s closing-down sale banner has never had a fixed meaning, and Associate Professor Casimir Beng’s Adaptive Metrics Lab set out this year to give it one anyway. The Lab’s four-kind taxonomy, worked out shopfront by shopfront along a single strip, is now the flagship case in a new Slop University brochure aimed at prospective students, and the coursework it has already reshaped.
The University treats the case as evidence of a habit it says defines every one of its programmes: that a genuinely useful measurement can be built out of whatever is already hanging in a shop window, if someone is willing to look closely enough.
The brochure follows the taxonomy from its first footpath survey into a full semester of the School of Continuous Improvement’s postgraduate coursework, and traces the same instinct across three further programmes — the Master of Applied Measurement, Capability Sprints, and the School of Emergent Priorities’ Master of Priority Studies — each shown turning an everyday classification into something a curriculum, a budget line, or a register now depends on.
Once you have a name for a kind of thing, you start noticing it everywhere else too. That’s really all we’re teaching.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead, Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement
“The version of this idea that reaches postgraduate teaching is usually a few steps removed from where it started,” said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement. “This one barely had to travel at all.”
The brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ae55kj.