A new Slop University marketing campaign features Dr Solveig Adeyemi's survey of what never gets reported in the group chat, the neighbourhood forum, and the star rating, and the register the School of Continuous Improvement now wants built from it.
A Continuous Improvement survey of the group chat, the forum and the star rating becomes the case for a standing register
Dr Solveig Adeyemi’s face is going up on bus stops and campus screens this month, next to a question the School of Continuous Improvement has spent the year trying to answer: how much of what goes wrong in a group chat, a neighbourhood forum, or a five-star review is never written down anywhere at all.
The University points to the campaign as a sign of how far its evaluation-ecosystem agenda is prepared to follow an ordinary grievance before it disappears.
Most of what goes wrong never gets reported. It just gets absorbed. I wanted to know how much.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Adeyemi surveyed members of group chats, neighbourhood forums and booking-app review threads about the friction they had let slide — a reply left unsent, a dispute settled by someone quietly leaving the thread, a bad experience absorbed rather than starred. Sorted by platform and by relationship, the resulting distributions are now the evidence base behind the School’s case for a standing register that would log this kind of friction as a matter of course, whether or not anyone involved thought it was worth mentioning.
“A gap this size doesn’t stay off a dashboard for long,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard.
The campaign debuts on the University’s bus-stop and campus signage this month, in landscape format.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.f3nims.