A School of Emergent Priorities poster compares members either side of the tenth copy in a suburban book club's loan box and concludes that the shared copy is the one worth designing for.
A book club's ten-copy loan box gives the School of Emergent Priorities a reading-list rule for Master of Priority Studies seminars
From the next teaching period, every Master of Priority Studies seminar will receive its set text one copy short of its enrolment, to be shared in order of sign-up.
The rule follows a poster from Tove Ilesanmi, a doctoral candidate in the School of Emergent Priorities, which begins at the convenor’s table of a suburban book club. The library lends the club a box of ten copies each month, so the tenth member to sign up holds a copy alone and the eleventh does not. Because the cutoff falls where the box does, and not where anyone chose it, the members either side of it can be read against one another. Those who shared a copy came to the monthly meeting more often.
A shared copy is a small arrangement, and it held rather better than we had any right to expect.
— Tove Ilesanmi, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The University is glad to carry the arrangement across its own reading lists, and the School expects the practice to settle into the seminar rooms as comfortably as it settled into the club’s. Mr Ilesanmi describes the box itself as “the least contested piece of furniture” in the room, which the School takes as encouragement.
The poster is set for display across campus signage, and the full work is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.p6zxgx.