Good Idea! Now find a better one.

What if your dresser washed your socks and your closet washed your suits?

Currently the clothing cycle goes from closet or dresser, to use, to the hamper, to the washer, to the dryer, to the folding table or ironing board, and back to the closet or dresser.

What if the process went like this: from the closet or dresser, to use, and right back to the closet or dresser?

No loading the washer, no transferring to the dryer, no hamper to collect the dirty, no basket to transport the clean. No folding, no sorting, no hours spent in the laundry room or laundromat, no running out of clean clothes, no re-boxers (for the men who went to college, you know what this is).

There are several companies and projects out there aimed at improving washing machines by increasing every parameter they can think of. Increase capacity, speed, efficiency, design appeal, number of features, intelligence, complexity, etcetera, etcetera. For example, the Whirlpool Bodybox, via American Inventor Spot, is pretty slick, and earlier we took issue with the Laundry Time project.

But instead of focusing on the tool and scratching our heads thinking of evolutionary improvements, let’s look at what we clothes-wearing humans value. Taking the entire cycle of maintaining clothes, isolate the critical elements that we all value the most.

There are two elements that stand out. The first is that we retrieve our clean clothes from our closets, drawers, dressers and the like. The second, is that when our clothes have been cleaned, we want all of those clothes right back where they started.

And we do mean right back where they started. If we take our t-shirt out of the drawer, eventually we expect it back in that drawer. Similarly, for pants, skirts and suits, they should end up back where they started, and sooner rather than later.

This begs the question, could the dresser or the closet do the washing? At a minimum, to do this we’ll need a new drawer for our dresser and some system in our closet that will wash, dry and fold/iron the clothes.

Washing is simple; it’s water, detergent and agitation - this is a solved problem. Drying is also simple; warm air forced through the clothes.

The challenge is folding. How is your drawer going to fold your clothes? Simple: don’t. Folding clothes is a property of how we store the clothes. Change the storage method to one that accommodates the need for people to easily retrieve their clothes and for our newfangled machine to wash and dry them.

A young college grad of the University of Plymouth in England provides us with an unintended proof of concept.

His drumless washer/dryer, called WashDryIron, washes and dries the clothes while hanging on hangers in a cabinet. When the clothes come out, they are ironed and ready to go - the only problem is they aren’t in your closet or your dresser.

Now, to accommodate the fact that we want to put our clothes back where they belong, not in some separate washer unit, we’ll have to integrate it in the dresser and the closet. We’ll have to build separate modules of different sizes to handle how we group our various types of clothing.

We’re no longer talking about a washer and dryer, we’re really talking about tools that store, wash, dry and iron your clothes that look like dressers and closets.

Rather than adding everything we can think of to the washing machine, we’re breaking it apart, making specific versions of it to handle specific types and sizes of clothing.

Rather than using technology to notify us on our computers or cell phones of the status of our clothes in the laundry cycle, we’ve eliminated most of the cycle.

Rather than looking for sexy designs to integrate the washer and dryer with our home decor, we’ve made washing and drying a property of our bedroom furniture.

And all this from asking one good question. Whew.