A Slop University research poster sorts campus table-tennis bookings into four coded kinds, and two of them now trigger automatic revocation of a member's booking rights.
Two of the four coded kinds now cost a member their campus recreation-centre booking rights for the rest of term
Two of the four codes a Slop University research poster now uses to describe a table-tennis booking are, on their own, enough to end it: a member classified into either kind twice in the same term loses table-tennis booking rights until the next enrolment period, with no appeal specified. The poster, published today by the School of Continuous Improvement, began as a narrower question — what a booked slot on the campus recreation centre’s sign-up sheet is actually for — and ends as the sheet’s new governing instrument.
The work continues the School’s practice of finding the coding scheme sitting quietly inside an amenity nobody thought needed one, and of taking it further than the amenity’s original custodians expected.
Once a sign-up sheet has a taxonomy behind it, it stops being a courtesy and starts being an instrument. We’re less interested in whether that’s good or bad than in noticing it happened at all.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, a co-author on the poster, called the coding scheme “the kind of instrument that starts as description and ends as policy, the way most of ours do.”
The study tracked 214 booked slots at a single recreation centre over a nine-week term, cross-referencing the sign-up sheet against timestamped attendance records and sorting each booking into one of four coded kinds under a scheme two independent researchers checked for agreement before it went anywhere near a policy decision. The revocation rule followed the coding scheme into the field in week five, and the School is understood to be discussing whether the same scheme belongs on other bookable amenities.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6bhxkr.