The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Marit Osayande and Dr Torun Ezeigwe a grant to run a weekly physical check of a laundromat's available-machine board against the machines themselves, with a successor named before the checking role can lapse.
The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund backs Dr Marit Osayande and Dr Torun Ezeigwe's audit of a laundromat's available-machine board, with a named successor lined up before the checking lapses
A laundromat’s available-machine board tells a story that stops updating the moment its last conscientious user moves out of the building. After that, the sign says whatever it said last, and every load in an occupied machine is a coin flip for the customer trusting it.
The School of Continuous Improvement’s newest funded project treats that sign as an indicator like any other: something that degrades not because it was wrong once, but because nobody was ever assigned to keep it right. Its Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund backs a weekly verification round, in which a rostered volunteer walks the machines, checks each one against the board’s claim, and corrects the drift before it compounds.
An indicator doesn’t stop working when it’s wrong. It stops working when the person who used to fix it moves to a different building.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
Co-grantee Dr Torun Ezeigwe, who studies how a measurement instrument drifts once it leaves the validation study for ordinary use, said the laundromat case had the advantage of a fast feedback loop: “you don’t wait a semester to find out the rubric’s gone soft. You wait until someone’s holding a wet towel.”
The project also names a successor before the current volunteer’s roster turns over, so the checking role survives the handover its own accuracy depends on. The School counts the sign among the plainer proofs of a discipline it usually has to argue for in the abstract. The award is $158,439, funded under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Keeping the Laundromat's Available-Machine Board Honest After the Regulars Stop Reporting · $158,439 · awarded to Marit Osayande, Torun Ezeigwe