A School of Emergent Priorities poster reads the pay-and-display ticket as a four-cell quadrant across 520 cars at a suburban shopping-centre car park, and the University adopts a Face-Up Rule for its staff car-park permits.
A School of Emergent Priorities poster sorts 520 parked cars by the minutes bought and the way up the ticket lies, and the University adopts a Face-Up Rule for its own permits
The small square of paper behind a windscreen has been given a season of attention. “Notes on the Face-Up Ticket”, a research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, follows 520 cars at one suburban shopping-centre car park over fourteen consecutive Saturdays and places each in a cell: minutes covered or short, ticket face-up or face-down.
A ticket is about the smallest document most of us will hold this week, and it was a pleasure to give one a whole season of attention. We hope it is looked at a little more kindly from here.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The poster brings the School’s anticipatory-capability agenda to the pay-and-display machine. It sets what a ticket says beside what a ticket shows, and reports that the notice that follows tracks the second more closely than the first. In response, the University adopts a Face-Up Rule for its staff car-park permits from the next permit year: a permit not displayed face-up is treated as unissued, whatever its paid-until time.
Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, said the team was “glad to leave every ticket exactly where its driver had put it”. The University takes quiet pride in a rule that can be checked from the footpath, and Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee, welcomed the work as a good companion to the University’s existing arrangements for its car parks.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.suetxz.