A new Slop University signage poster sorts the requests for a strip-mall café's customers-only toilet key into five kinds of asker and sets out the café's undertaking to ring up every key handed over as a sale.
A signage piece for the Master of Priority Studies sorts the people who ask for the key on the spoon into five kinds, and the till follows the sorting.
Whoever asks for the key, the till is to be told. That is the standing arrangement a strip-mall café has entered into following a signage piece from the School of Emergent Priorities, published today for bus-stop panels and campus digital screens in support of the Master of Priority Studies.
The piece draws on the Spoon Ledger, a register kept by Doctoral Candidate Tove Ilesanmi at the end of a counter where the customers-only toilet key hangs from a wooden spoon. Each request is entered under one of five kinds of asker, according to what the person already is to the till: a relationship, in the Ledger’s terms, that runs from long-standing to not yet begun. The café reads the entry at close of business and rings up every key handed over as a sale of the kind it was sorted into, with no provision for an ordinary exception.
What a person is to the till turned out to be a longer conversation than any of us had planned for.
— Doctoral Candidate Tove Ilesanmi, School of Emergent Priorities
The poster was developed with Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, who said the program was the natural home for “learning to keep a spoon in view”. The School regards the Ledger as a significant addition to its work on how everyday arrangements settle into standing commitments, and is proud to see the café carry the scheme into its daily trading.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.nc1bp0.