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The future of laundry: From lonely chore to social event?

What will life at home be like 20 years from now? How will our children and their children lead their lives? Electrolux is helping HSB Living Lab and Chalmers University find out.

By the end of 2016, we set up the Electrolux Future Laundry Studio as part of HSB Living Lab, a unique Swedish research project aimed at developing tomorrow’s living spaces. This is just one of our many efforts to deliver great and sustainable consumer experiences.  

A living laboratory

HSB Living Lab consists of 29 apartments where the residents, who are either students, visiting scholars or HSB members, live in a constantly changing environment that is being monitored the entire time. In addition to the residential section and the shared laundry studio equipped with professional appliances, the building includes exhibition areas, conference rooms, offices and much more. It is literally a living laboratory where technological and architectural innovations will be tested for 10 years. Electrolux is one of nine contributing partners.

State-of-the-art equipment

Electrolux has provided state-of-the-art equipment to the Future Laundry Studio. The washing machines have sensors that measure the amount of laundry and ensure that just the right amount of water and detergent are added. Also, we teamed up with Professor Larry Toups, who normally works at NASA in Houston, to come up with more fresh ideas to reduce water and energy consumption.

Changing the entire experience

Apart from considering the environmental and financial costs of washing clothes, we are considering how we could change the entire experience of doing laundry. Perhaps, with ultra-efficient and silent machines, the shared laundry rooms typically found in Swedish apartment buildings could be converted into social spaces.

Being part of HSB Living Lab gives Electrolux the chance to challenge how we deal with textiles, and develop simpler and far more pleasant and sustainable ways of handling laundry.

Learn more about HSB Living Lab and the journey towards the living of the future.

Partners for more sustainable living

The HSB Living Lab is supported by Electrolux and offers a unique platform to perform research, co-creation workshops and studies in a fully operational laundry studio. By enabling a common space, where innovative people from different areas can cooperate and develop ideas on how to shape a sustainable future living, the Lab aims to realize its vision to come up with new insights that would not be found in conventional research.

The Living Lab works as a hub for collecting ideas, helping to initiate projects and collaborating between adjacent businesses to promote more sustainable living. Electrolux Professional is a stakeholder in the research board, which monitors and initiates projects primarily related to laundry, whist acting as a link to the rest of the Electrolux Group.

“The partnership means that we can access data, behavior patterns and knowledge to put our products into a broader perspective and gives us a deeper understanding to develop even more sustainable solutions for the future.”

Mattias Johansson, Innovation & Technology Manager, Electrolux Professional

This case study is related to our promise Constantly improve product performance and efficiency