Washsurfing it’s a service that allow to share private washing-machines.
This concept was developed in three days during the IxDa11 student competition, the general topic was “use, not own”. Thanks to this concept I won the honorable mention, but beside the prize it has been an amazing experience.
I got in to the finals thanks to a project called Laundrym, a pretty complex project that tried to transform Laudromat in social shared spaces.
I kept those three days to review the ground research that I had to explore a different approach, and start to build something much simpler, and that could be realized now.
Sharing an heavy object as a laundry has different implication than landing an hairdryer because it’s heavy! You are stuck in a physical space with somebody: this could be a problem, but what if we see it as an opportunity?
I really believe that sharing it’s a matters of behaviors before than sharing the real object. Sharing it’s something that we’re not trained to do anymore. In somehow people need to be re-educated to share.
People don’t share anymore because (maybe) it’s not needed, and so we don’t know who live next door, but we miss the fact that we don’t know who’s our neighbor, because this could make us feel more safe for example.
There is a lot of things that we miss from the past, I’m often asking to myself if the improvement of technology can give us those things back… things that people feel they lost because of the technology improvement.
During the conference I had the opportunity to attend the keynote talk by Richard Buchanan, and he said something that made me think a lot, and express something that I had in my head but I couldn’t find the way to say it, and for sure a way that is as good as his: “…we are not building interactions between people and things, but we are building interactions between people through things…”
