LaunMod — Design Proposition

Double Life

Our redesign mission for the dull and neglected laundry bag was to give it a double life. Firstly — a concealed yet airy space to store your dirty laundry and secondly — a comfortable and cute seat! No longer will your laundry bag sit sadly in a corner of your room, waiting until laundry day to be noticed. We were motivated to take this design direction to give the laundry basket more of a front and center role as a furniture in disguise rather than something that serves a singular purpose of a dreaded chore.

Purposeful

When we shop for new bedding, rug or upholstery, we often tend to get matching colors and patterns to fit the vibe of our room. Why do we not think of our laundry basket the same way? Instead of hiding it behind closet doors, we redesigned it to become part of the theme of your room by customizing based on the color of the bag and cushion. A conscious and purposeful choice gives the laundry doer a more meaningful attachment with it as it is now a piece of furniture that symbolizes their preferences, serves as a seat for a visitor and helps in utility.

Modularity

Our laundry basket is intended to be easy to build and take apart. This is meant to make repairs, upsizing/downsizing, and cleaning easier compared to other furniture pieces. Therefore, you come with a kit of parts that slot together and make a beautiful seat for your space. This also means you are able to choose how many baskets would best fit your lifestyle, and you’re able to change this in the future without throwing out your whole basket. Lastly, the cushion cover can be easily taken off since it’s secured with a frame and zipper, which makes the cover easily washable and replaceable.

Build it

Often what holds people back from buying aesthetic furniture is the time effort or cost (hello TaskRabbit!) that goes into assembly. For the legs of the chair, we designed pieces that snap and lock into place to reduce the cognitive load to understand the instructions and using complex tools. All the layers go together in a logical sequence- legs, bag, seat top and seat cushion. The hinge of the seat top can be screwed into place with a simple screwdriver. We believe this frustration free process of assembly will give the user a meaningful bond with the product.

Categorize

For our product we wanted to encourage better laundry habits, so we figured we could give suggestive stickers in the manual to help organization. We decided to make stickers for dirty and clean, amount of times to re-wear items, color sorting suggestions, and blank customizable ones to fit different laundry lifestyles. Between our modularity, stickers, and dual-purpose style furniture we are hoping to create a new interaction with laundry that supports a more effective and sustainable lifestyle for the user.

Transportation

Ensuring stability and security is really important when aiming for the sustainability of our product. Therefore, we implemented buckles to attach the padded handles to the bag. We also designed our laundry bag to be similar to the form of backpacks, making it easier to be transported. The padded handles were designed to have large contact areas with customers’ shoulders for the purpose of reducing stress when transporting and adding friction to prevent slipping. Further, customers only need to use the drawstring on the top of the bag to seal it, then they can easily transport their laundry around places.

Ventilation

For the purpose of ventilation of the laundry bag itself and allowing customers to keep track of the left spaces of the bag, we designed this slit on the side of the bag. Making the laundry process more predictable for customers.

Product Life Cycle

In order to make our product more sustainable and able to last longer in customers’ homes, when parts are broken, customers would be able to purpose that specific parts on our company website. Further, since our product is made of recyclable materials, we also suggested customers recycle the broken parts. Customers could send the broken parts back to us and we would give them a discount on their next purchase to promote a health circular economy.