Low-tech Magazine featured Jonas Görgen’s mist shower in an earlier article. He did a second graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven that is worth mentioning: the clothesline that goes around the corner:

Revive the ol’ clothesline! This pulley system can move objects around the corner of a building. Following (or avoiding) the sun can help with making the most of the momentary weather conditions.

Modern buildings often trap the inhabitants into unsustainable practices such as using a tumble dryer or a large refrigerator. Making practical use of outside spaces of buildings is commonplace around the globe, from clotheslines spanning across streets in Italy to roofs crowded with jugs full of fermenting Kimchi in Korea.

It is not merely about resourcefulness, as these practices become part of the identity of a place.

In a reaction, he writes that “I wanted to think of a possibility to break out of the lifestyle that is dictated by the building in which you live”.

Source: Jonas Görgen.

“It’s winter in northern Europe, and there’s no electricity. How can you dry your laundry? One of the best places of all is a laundry room in the servants’ quarters of a mansion house. A generous ceiling height means you can have frames for wet clothes and household linen in the warmest, dryest part of the room. The estate handyman would make them, and by the later 19th century he would probably add ropes and a pulley to raise and lower the rack. No need to climb on a chair to hang laundry.”

Read more: Drying clothes near the ceiling, HomeThingsPast.

With L’Increvable you change each component when needed. You don’t have to be a handy(wo)man: the Increvable website guides you through each component maintenance thanks to well-documented tutorials and each new component is delivered with proper tools.

You buy the washing machine in flat-pack form and then you assemble it yourself : it gives you the opportunity to get to know the machine. The traditional 30 kg (60 lbs) of cement ballast are replaced by a water tank. The latter is automatically filled during the first use of the machine. This means that the machine can be made lighter again when it needs to be moved.

By removing all highly technical and hardly replaceable parts from the structure and built with such specifications from the ground up, the Increvable is destined to be easily manipulable by the mere user. The missing technologic parts (i.e. touchable screen) do change the User Experience in a very fundamental way, giving maybe to some of us a certain old school feel to the tech but adds several dozens of years before obsolescence as a result.”

See & read more: 1 / 2 / 3. Thanks to Christopher Santerre.

Some machines require both power and water. A household example is the washing machine. By using a small water wheel, the water that is needed to wash the clothes can also serve to power the machine. Washing machines powered by water from the town mains were quite common in the early decades of the twentieth century. The pictures show a portable American model called the “Washerette” (see it in operation in this video). It was connected to a faucet and put on the sink or bathtub so that exhaust water could be easily captured. The images were found at Smokstak.

“GiraDora is a blue bucket that conceals a spinning mechanism that washes clothes and then partially dries them. It’s operated by a foot pedal, while the user sits on the lid to stabilize the rapidly churning contents. Sitting alleviates lower-back pain associated with hand-washing clothes, and frees up the washer to pursue other tasks. It’s portable, so it can be placed nearby a water source, or even inside on a rainy day. It reduces health risks like joint problems, skin irritation, and mold inhalation. Most importantly, it uses far less water and cleans clothes faster than conventional hand-washing.”

Hat tip to Kaan Ozdurak.