A School of Continuous Improvement research poster places a student union's corridor corkboards on a five-level pin-hygiene scale and follows what the boards carried as they climbed it.
Thirty-six student-union boards followed across fourteen fortnightly walks, from Palimpsest to Bare Cork.
The union’s noticeboard warden carries a tray of drawing pins and, until this year, had no shared word for what a well-kept board looks like. Still Up After the Open Day, a new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, supplies five: Palimpsest, Stamped, Pruned, Pin-Accounted and Bare Cork.
The board only ever says what someone pinned on it. We wanted to see what it would say if it were asked to be tidy.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
The work places thirty-six corridor corkboards on the ladder at each of fourteen fortnightly walks, and follows what the boards held as they rose. Old notices thinned steadily. Notices for events still to come thinned too, and the poster sets the two curves side by side without choosing between them.
The union’s executive has since tied each board’s pin allowance, and the life of a notice for a past event, to the level the board reaches, and will unmount a board that holds nothing on two walks running. Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer at the School, described the walks as “a good reason to look up from the phone at the end of a corridor.”
The release marks a settled chapter in the School’s attention to the small furniture of shared spaces, and the University is glad to see a scale meet a wall on terms the wall could bear.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.t540sx.