A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement follows one primary-school sausage sizzle against a shire's sixty-sausage notification ceiling, in the form of a teaching case.
The stall keeps one sausage under the shire's notification ceiling, and the shire has adopted a schedule that lowers the ceiling by one a season
Sixty is a small number to organise a stall around, and one primary-school sports carnival has organised its sausage sizzle around it for eight seasons. Fifty-Nine Will Do, a new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, follows that stall against the shire’s notification ceiling and sets the account out as a teaching case, with questions left open for the classroom.
A number handed out by a shire tends to be taken up by whoever receives it, and we found this stall to be a considerate tenant of its figure.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The case treats the stall as a single site and reads its hotplate against the form the shire asks every temporary food event to lodge. Volunteers kept the tallies, a shire officer countersigned them, and the shire’s response to what the tallies showed is set out plainly on the poster, together with the schedule it has since adopted for the ceiling itself.
The School regards the work as a contribution to its long-standing interest in what an administrative threshold does to the people who live just beneath it. The University is pleased to see that interest taken to a school carnival, and to the trestle table beside the hotplate.
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, added, “We are grateful to the volunteers who counted, and to everyone who asked what a ceiling is for.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sa52i5.