A new Slop University advertising campaign, led by Associate Professor Casimir Beng, sets out the five-level oar-rack scale a rowing club now scores itself against and the purchasing rule that follows it.
A landscape signage campaign follows a rowing club's duty officer through the five named levels of the boat-shed oar rack.
An oar that leans against the wall and an oar that sits in its numbered slot are, to the casual eye, the same oar. A rowing club’s boat-shed duty officer has been asked to tell them apart, and a new landscape campaign from the School of Continuous Improvement shows how the club has taken to the task.
The campaign is the work of Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. It presents the five levels the duty officer now scores the rack against, from Leaning on the Wall at the lowest to Returned Before Breakfast at the highest, and the club’s rule that follows from them: the committee buys no new oar until the rack has attested the next level up. The poster’s headline treats the club’s present standing as groundwork, and the supporting line sets the arrangement out in a single sentence.
A rack is a small place in which to see an organisation. The oars were already telling the committee something, and the scale gave it a way to be listened to.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead, Adaptive Metrics Lab
The campaign runs in matched daylight and evening versions on the University’s landscape signage panels. Its call to action invites passers-by to meet the researchers, and its small print points to three earlier outputs on the way community clubs keep their own records. The Lab reads the arrangement as a clear instance of the maturity work it convenes, carried out in a shed with a hose and a view of the water.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qmkb4u.