A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions dates the layered placards on one chemistry building's doors and asks whom each layer was written for.
A study of hazard placards on thirty-eight doors finds the door now speaks to its auditor first
The School of Underlying Conditions has made a habit of looking beneath the surface of things, and its newest research poster takes that habit to the nearest available surface. Who the Door Is Talking To: A Media-Archaeological Reading of Hazard Placards on Thirty-Eight Laboratory Doors is the work of Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, with Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Ms Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate.
Every building on campus is wearing its history on its doors. We have begun with one corridor, and the University is fortunate to have a great many corridors.
— Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions
The team approached the building’s doors as a layered record, aligning stratigraphic practice with communication scholarship to surface the evolving relationship between a notice and its intended reader. Across 450 surviving placards, the poster traces a gradual shift in address, from the person about to enter towards the person who will later check that the notice is there.
The work sits naturally within the School’s sustained commitment to reading the University’s own surroundings closely, and to the quiet disciplines of record-keeping that make such reading possible.
Dr Mensah described the project as a chance to “spend a season with sentences that have outlasted the situations they were written for, in roughly the order they were written”, adding that the School of Emergent Priorities had found the collaboration “entirely in keeping with its interests”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qzqufn.