Slop University adopts a community film society's eleven-minute start-time interrupt as the rule for reallocating seminar rooms that have not begun.
A film-society house-lights interrupt is now the University's seminar-room stop
A community film society’s projectionist now starts the waiting-list short eleven minutes after the time on the door, and the University has decided to treat its own seminar rooms the same way. The School of Emergent Priorities today releases a research poster by Sunniva Balogun, Dr Anouk Mensah and Dr Lindiwe Achterberg describing the house-lights controller they built for Saturday screenings and the seminar-slot stop the Office of the Vice-Chancellor has bound itself to on the back of it.
The School takes the work as an instance of its anticipatory-capability agenda, in which a published time is treated as a decision rather than a courtesy.
The projectionists who let us instrument the booth already knew the foyer better than any log. The interrupt is our way of taking that seriously.
— Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
Across eighteen societies the controller drops the house lights and cues the waiting-list short at advertised plus eleven minutes, with no projectionist override. The poster reports that the interrupt fires on most advertised features, that median delay falls onto the eleven-minute mark, and that societies keep the feature only by printing a start earlier than the picture they mean. The seminar-slot rule inherits that displacement: a seminar that has not begun eleven minutes after its published start is displaced by the next waiting-list booking, and a chair has no override.
Dr Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School, said the printed start had a habit of outlasting the session it named. “Once a start is on the door it tends to become the thing the room is for, even when the feature has already given way.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.udyeb9.