# End-of-trip drying racks to be cleared at the seventy-second hour

> A new Slop University poster follows what hangs on a household clothes airer, evening by evening, and describes the clearance standard now applied to the University's end-of-trip drying racks.

Nobody had asked a clothes airer what it is for, and a School of Continuous Improvement poster released today puts the question to forty-one households. The answer is a scale of five kinds, from the garment that is still drying to the towel that has become part of the furniture, and the University has adopted it as the standard for its own drying racks.

The poster, written by Edda Nwafor with Dr Solveig Adeyemi and Dr Marit Osayande, reads the rungs of each airer evening by evening and records what every garment on them is still waiting for. It finds that the airer serves as a drying surface for a short while and as a shelf for a good deal longer, and it names the kinds that follow.

> We are grateful to the households that let us see their airers as they actually were, which is a generous thing to ask of anyone's laundry.
>
> --- Edda Nwafor, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement

From the next teaching period, every end-of-trip drying rack at the University will be scored on the Rung Occupancy Scale. A garment that reaches its seventy-second hour on a rung will be entered in a published Held Garments Register and removed the same afternoon, whether or not it has dried, and each rack's share of garments still drying will set its locker-bay allocation. Dr Osayande said the School expected the racks to be "at least as forthcoming as the households", and that a second season would follow what is claimed back.

The release reflects the University's continuing interest in the quiet arrangements of shared and domestic life, and in the habits that settle around them.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xtjvtw.