It’s weekend. You get up late, and decide to go out for brunch. You go to the wardrobe and it hits you, “I don’t have fresh clothes to wear.” Your pile of clothes has been sitting in the basket for a week and you procrastinated the task. This happened to me recently. I wondered, “why do we have to do laundry every week?” Why can’t the washing machine just take the dirty clothes and do it by itself.

And here we are. This is my experiment with writing down moonshot ideas. I particularly chose physical products because it pushes me to think different. I have been working on software products for many years and rarely I paid attention to the physical products around me. Over the years, I’ve been noticing that the gap between the physical and the digital products is minimising. We have app-controlled home devices like vacuum cleaners, light bulbs, electric vehicles etc. It will only get better from here.

Back to my laundry problem. While there may be a segment of population that enjoys doing the laundry, I completely hate it. I dread the day I have to do the laundry.

Sure, we have come a long way from walking miles to a source of water and washing our clothes with hands. Those days are in the past. Being in tech, I cannot help but think, “why is our laundry stuck in the ancient past?”

Let’s see a typical person’s journey doing laundry:

You take off your dirty clothes and throw them in the laundry basket → You choose a day to sort the clothes and dump them in the washing machine → Load the detergent → Choose the wash cycle and run it → If you have separate dryer then transfer the clothes to the dryer → You take the clothes out → Fold the clothes.

You repeat this either daily, weekly or even monthly.

All we need is fresh clothes, washed and dried. This is literally our goal.

What if…We completely redesign our laundry experience.

After shower, throw the clothes in the machine. Your machine takes care of the rest. All you need to do is take the folded clothes and keep it in the wardrobe. (Of course, you can have a robot to do this for you, but one idea at a time).

I just want to dump my dirty clothes daily in one section. The machine should be able to sort the clothes in different piles based on fabric type and color.

After a pile is sufficiently full, the machine chooses to load them in the washer. The washer can have its own intelligence for choosing a specific cycle and loading the detergent as required from an attached bottle.

Once the washing is done, the dry cycle can start.

After the clothes are dried, it should move the clothes to next section to fold the clothes. This is optional, in my opinion. Because our goal is to have fresh laundry, folding is a bonus!

That’s it! That is my idea.

If you notice every step here has the potential to make it more efficient. The sorting stage can be made very sophisticated. The washing part itself can be optimised for efficiency and energy consumption. The possibilities are endless!

How to implement this and how does this work? I have no idea. However, I am not looking at feasibility of this product. It is just a crazy idea and I want to document it. I hope that one day someone will find a solution.

Anyway, just for fun, I used AI to generate this dreamy machine for me. Here is the image and I don’t know what to think of it:

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What would have been your prompt for AI to give the most accurate image?