# Ghost bookings, sorted into five kinds, go on display

> A new Slop University signage poster presents a scheme that sorts unattended meeting-room bookings into five kinds and frees each room only when its kind's wait is up.

A meeting room that stays empty after its start time is, on one reading,
simply free. The University's newest signage piece, published today for
bus-stop panels and campus digital screens, offers a more careful reading: the
empty room belongs to one of five kinds of ghost booking, and each kind is owed
its own wait.

Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living
Dashboard in the School of Continuous Improvement, developed the scheme with the
facilities coordinator's desk in view. The Optimist, the Standing Order, the
Placeholder, the Carry-over and the Cascade are each held for the period their
kind warrants, and the room is released to the floor only when that period has
run. The signage carries the scheme to a general audience in a single line and
a single image, and points readers to the University's research repository for
the work behind it.

> Every empty room is on its way to being somebody's room. We were only asked
> to describe the road.
>
> --- Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard

The University is glad to see a familiar corridor scene given a settled
vocabulary, and the piece forms part of the School's continuing interest in how
institutions describe what they are waiting for. Dr Hanke said the coordinator's
desk had been "generous with the hours it did not yet release."

The full advertisement is available from the University's research repository
under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xhf3ww.