A new Slop University display advertisement sets a highway of grain towns under a single campaign line and points readers to the University's research on regional development.
A landscape advertisement from the School of Emergent Priorities brings the University's corridor model of regional competition to the signage panels.
A highway, a string of grain towns and one city on the horizon make up the whole of the School of Emergent Priorities’ newest display advertisement. Its campaign line, Somebody has to be the gateway, puts the University’s regional development research in front of anyone waiting long enough to read it.
The advertisement is the work of Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the School. It takes as its hook Gateway to What? Positional Competition among Regions when Destinations Are Costly, by Dr Vigdis Emenike and Dr Brynjar Obiora of the School of Underlying Conditions, and carries that paper’s DOI in its small print alongside two further studies of regional and inland life.
A town at the edge of a highway is always being told what it might become. I wanted the panel to give it a moment of being looked at as it is, and to let the research do the rest of the talking.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The campaign distils a formal account of how regions along a route position themselves into a single image, mobilising the University’s two-ink visual language to carry its connectivity-and-positioning agenda from the page to the street. The School counts it among its contributions to a wider University conversation about where value comes to rest along a corridor, and who is asked to carry it onward.
Dr Emenike welcomed the result. The paper, she said, “was always about a road it never had to draw, and it is a pleasure to see one drawn for it.”
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.36au4w.