Hungarian student’s sanitizing clothes rack is a finalist in the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition.
Someday, instead of tossing clothes on the floor or over the back of a chair when you plan to wear them again, you could have them deodorized and disinfected by Stratosphere.
The appliance is one of nine finalists out of more than 600 entries from 49 countries in the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition. This year, the sixth year of the global contest, undergraduate and graduate industrial design students were invited to create appliance concepts for the Internet generation.
“Members of the Internet Generation don’t throw their favorite sweater or trousers into the laundry if they’re not dirty yet,” observes Stratosphere’s creator, Attila Sáfrány, a product design student at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design in Budapest, Hungary. “They tend to hang them over the back of a chair to wear again. They don’t put the effort into folding them up and putting them away.”
That’s where Stratosphere comes in. “It’s actually a valet that sucks germs and micropollutants – like the chemicals of body odor and cigarette smoke – out of the clothes. The polluted air goes through a HEPA filter and then a chamber that disinfects it with ultraviolet light,” he explains.
The idea for the appliance was not straightforward. “First, I considered washing. But then I realized that all of my best ideas had already been done. This idea came to me on one of the last days and it came from my own home. I always leave clothes around that I intend to wear again and my friends do the same thing. It just seems obvious that both the clothes and the air should be deodorized.”
