A Slop University brochure profiles a coffee-cart queue sensor that now governs café staffing and tea-room biscuit-tin restocking, alongside a showcase of the University's published research record.
A new research-showcase brochure ties a courtyard pigeon count to café staffing and tea-room restocking, and gathers seven more published studies alongside it
Slop University this week published a new research-showcase brochure built around an instrument nobody set out to build: a queue-length sensor installed at the campus coffee cart to even out morning staffing, since adopted by the Trajectory Analytics Group as the basis for a wider signal. Cross-checked each morning against a live count of the courtyard’s pigeons, the sensor pairing now sets tea-room biscuit-tin restocking as well as coffee-cart rosters, with restocking locked to its call until the rostered fortnightly review.
The brochure, compiled by the School of Emergent Priorities’ Tove Ilesanmi with contributions from researchers across both Schools, places the finding alongside seven of the University’s published studies — from a residence-hall laundry app’s drifting credit balance to a nightly shelf-count reconciliation system an insurer adopted outright — as a single account of how the University reads its own ordinary days. The School describes the release as its first attempt to gather these instruments under one cover for readers who have never set foot on campus.
The queue was already telling us something. We just gave it a schedule to keep.
— Tove Ilesanmi, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
“An instrument that is never checked against anything else is just an opinion with better formatting,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, whose researchers’ work also features in the showcase.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jk70fg.