Group Members
- James Fox, jcfox@mit.edu
- Megan Roytman, meganr@mit.edu
- Chrisantha Perera, cperera@mit.edu
- TA:
Problem Statement
Laundry is a stunningly boring chore. Psych! We love it.
In communal living spaces, facilities such as laundry machines are often used by multiple people. Often, the number of machines is limited, and there are not enough dryers or washers for all those who want to use the laundry at a particular time. <This provides a hard limit on laundry throughput, but often there are periods of laundry inactivity.> Users do not have a reliable way to check several aspects of the laundry facility without being present in the laundry room:
- Whether any machines are open
- How long the wait time is to start a new load of laundry
- Whether the user's laundry is finished
- Whether any machines are broken
Even though they might be present in the facility, some information is not available to them. This information includes:
- Who owns the laundry occupying a machine which has finished running
- What settings should be used if wet laundry is to be moved to a dryer
- Who is the facility administrator (to be contacted if a machine is out of order)
We plan to create a website (with a mobile-accessible interface) that allows users to set up a laundry checking system. Ideally, such a system could provide much of the missing functionality that the perfect communal laundry facility would require. We plan to make the system provide automatic notifications to users when their laundry finishes, to allow users to message other users about moving their laundry, to afford users a method of communicating their wishes on the fate of their loads without having to be present, and to give users a way to view the current status of all laundry machines remotely.
GR1 - User and Task Analysis
GR2 - Designs
GR3 - Paper Prototyping