A School of Emergent Priorities poster reports a null on the standing ironing board, and the School withdraws the unfolded board as a chore-compliance signal.
Eleven months of household logging found no association with ironed shirts, and the protocol is withdrawn
A board left standing is not a board in use. The logging ran long enough to stop asking it to be.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The ironing board in a suburban laundry is often left up as a reminder that the shirts will be done. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, led by Dr Iben Chikere, reports that the reminder does not hold. Across 186 households, standing-board hours and weekly ironed-item counts sat on one another (r = 0.04). Mean items per week were 3.2 with the board up and 3.1 with it folded. The School has withdrawn the protocol.
The School is recording the null as the end of the standing-board file, not as a gap in it. A hinge-angle logger on the board leg, read against a weekly ironed-item diary, was the whole instrument. Thresholds were pre-registered. No covariate was added after registration. Board-folded weeks supplied the within-household comparator.
Standing-Board Neutrality Instruction 2026/03 is now in force: no university-affiliated household trial, staff housing, or demonstration kitchen may treat an unfolded ironing board as a readiness, utilisation, or chore-compliance signal. Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, said the trial “is closed because the cue did not move the count, and a closed file is the result the School is keeping.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ktuhe1.