A Slop University marketing campaign for the School of Emergent Priorities' Futures in Committee seminar series advertises Turn Assignment Prompts, a season-long household trial that reported no change in yard-watering behaviour, plant survival, or the water bill.
Turn Assignment Prompts logged a season of yard-watering reminders and changed nothing, and the School is putting that on a bus-stop panel rather than a shelf.
A campaign now rotating across the University’s landscape signage panels leads with the household trial’s own conclusion rather than a claim beyond it: Turn Assignment Prompts, a season of yard-watering reminders issued to whichever household member held the watering turn, moved neither plant survival nor the water bill. The School of Emergent Priorities is presenting the finding at the next sitting of Futures in Committee, its standing seminar series, this spring.
The School has taken to describing an unsalvaged result as its own kind of throughput.
A result that needs nothing added to it is the fastest a committee has ever cleared an agenda item.
— Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, School of Emergent Priorities
Turn Assignment Prompts rotated a plain-text nudge through a household’s existing watering roster for a full season, logging who received each prompt against metered water use and a fortnightly count of surviving plants. Neither measure moved against a pre-trial baseline, and the write-up closes there: no revised prompt cadence, no second trial, no call for further study. The campaign carries the result onto the same signage panels the University uses to advertise its research more broadly, alongside a standing line of prior published work for anyone who wants to check the rest of the record.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.psp99p.