Chinese student’s all-in-one laundry solution is a finalist in the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition.
Tired of carrying baskets of laundry back and forth? The see-through iBasket stores dirty clothes and automatically washes them when it fills up.
The wireless, remote-controlled appliance can be monitored via a personal computer and 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.
“As a member of the Internet generation myself, the inspiration for this came from everyday life,” says the appliance’s creator, Guopeng Liang, a design student at Tongji University in China. “We are busy working for our dreams and don’t have a lot of time to take care of clothes, nor do we like to.”
“But today, people store their clothes in a laundry hamper until it fills up, then carry the basket to the laundry room, wash them, come back, take them out, throw them back into the hamper, carry them to a clothesline and then hang them out. I believe that iBasket offers a much more convenient alternative.”
Liang says his favorite designers are Ross Lovegrove, Philippe Starck and Naoto Fukasawa. “Their work gives me inspiration about how to blend technology, aesthetics and philosophy into everyday objects.”
