How many times a semester do students wash their sheets? Once? Twice? It’s not that most students don’t want clean sheets; but doing a laundry is so inconvenient it can feel like a waste of time when balancing classes, homework, meals, and jobs.

After all, students must find and use an available washing machine, wait forty minutes while it’s doing its thing, find and use an available dryer, wait another hour, then bring all the clean clothing and bedding back upstairs to their bedrooms. In the dog-eat-dog world of dormitory laundry rooms, if you miss a beat your laundry might be pulled out and placed on the dusty top of machines or even thrown onto the floor, making the entire operation useless. “It’s annoying because we live on the third floor,” says Matt Kohn ’19. “If all the machines are full you have to walk all the way back upstairs.” And keep going back and forth until one opens up. 

Welcome to LaundryView, an online computer app that has changed all that. After students have used a simple interface to select their nearest laundry room, animations of the washers and dryers turn red when in use and tell you how many minutes are left in the cycle. Users can select a specific machine and enter their phone number to receive a text update when it’s become available. All that’s left to do is run down those three flights of stairs carrying your dirty sheets.

Suddenly, more Brown students are actually doing their laundry. “It’s super convenient,” says Miles Campbell ’19, “because I can do my work and know when my laundry is done. I’ve become more efficient.”

Illustration by Tim Cook