A School of Emergent Priorities research poster follows a single meeting-room whiteboard marked Do Not Erase and sets out the custody rule its studio has adopted.
A teaching case from one product-design studio ends with a standing rule for any board marked Do Not Erase.
Somewhere in a product-design studio there is a whiteboard that was told, in capital letters, to stay exactly as it is. A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, published today, follows that board for fourteen months and sets out what the studio has since decided it owes to it.
The poster is led by Doctoral Candidate Hedvig Anyanwu with Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, and Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas. It is written in the manner of a teaching case, with a single site, a photographic record and a short list of questions for discussion, and it draws on the studio’s booking calendar and its quarterly sweep log.
We are grateful to the studio for allowing one board to stand for a whole case.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The studio now treats any board marked Do Not Erase as a matter of custody. Each is re-affirmed by initials every quarter, with no provision for erasure, and a room holding such a board is released from the booking calendar. Dr Okwuosa said the arrangement had the quiet merit of being easy to follow, and that “a rule of this kind rewards the people who turn up on the day.”
The School regards the poster as a considered contribution to the way working spaces keep faith with what has been left in them. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cbcgn2.