#AirYourDirtyLaundry
How do you dry your laundry?
How do you dry your laundry?
On a hanger? In a tumble dryer? On a washing line? In your living room? We are interested in hearing about both mundane and inventive methods of drying.
Send us a picture and #AirYourDirtyLaundry.
As part of her research residency at the Design Museum, Marianna Janowicz is carrying out a public survey to understand how laundry is dried today.
Please submit a picture and any additional information to laundry@designmuseum.org.
About the project
One of the 2022/23 Design Researchers in Residence, Marianna Janowicz is exploring homes as individual domestic ‘islands’ and their relation to natural resource depletion and the climate crisis. Questioning the strict reliance on personal appliances – such as washing machines, dryers and ovens – and individualised notions of both comfort and labour, the project will connect domestic practices with the wider infrastructures and resources they rely on.
Mould complaints in England’s social housing doubled over the last two years and as the 2021 Housing Ombudsman report suggests, issues of damp, mould and condensation are repetitively blamed on tenants’ ‘lifestyles’ and routines such as cooking and drying laundry. The tragic death of two year old Awaab Ishak – caused by chronic exposure to mould – highlights the scale of the problem and the negligence of landlords, who stigmatise residents by placing responsibility on individual choices, rather than systemic failings. Decades of industrial pollution in Britain have meant that clean air is finally on the agenda of the public consciousness. But while outdoor pollution levels are measured and relayed in the media, the urban interior remains an under-investigated sphere where internal air quality issues have serious effects on the human health.
At the core of Marianna's project is a contention that domestic practices – such as drying laundry – are not discreet, private and individual, but part of larger systems. By gathering information about how laundry is dried today, the project seeks to reverse the prevailing, top-down narrative which marginalises the lived experience of housing in the UK. Taking the point of view that ‘everybody designs’ Marianna is interested in hearing about the many ways people deal with the everyday routine of drying laundry, an activity that encompasses embodied knowledge of one’s own space and environment.
