This is Fold - laundry without the wasted trip

What it does

Fold poses two main interventions for the Yale laundry experience. ** **The Fold App — This app shows you the business of the laundry room in advance so you can plan when to wash your clothes. It suggests off-peak hours, shows open and closed laundry machines, and cubbies to store washed clothes if needed. Practically, we would utilize Yale's official Laundry API available to students and developers via its developer infrastructure (yes, this actually exists!)

Room Redesign — Yale's laundry rooms are not spatially optimized for the best laundry experience. To address this, we propose sanctioning parts of the laundry room into various zones, streamlining the process of getting laundry washed, dried, and folded. The one structural addition is vertical. This would include twelve open, numbered cubbies mounted above an eight-foot folding counter, so a finished load has somewhere to go that isn't the machine it's holding. Since many Yale students simply forget laundry pods or find lint/mold after their wash, we propose a bench and a charging post for the short wait, a board for lost socks and broken machines, bulk eco detergent and lint rollers, warm lighting instead of fluorescent.

How we built it

The app was built via html, css, and javascript. It is currently deployed by Vercel and is available live to test out.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging to sample/survey enough Yale students to accurately represent the Yale laundry experience. Additionally, the Yale laundry API is not publicly available for use. All features and proposed ideas are based on synthetic data.