ID professors, here's a potential assignment for your students that they can develop and test while still stuck at home.

Urban Clotheslines is a website dedicated to selling hideaway laundry-drying contraptions. While it's kind of fun to browse through their offerings, just to see the variety of designs…

…I'm struck by how janky, cheap, weird or difficult-to-use everything seems.

I like the company's mission; getting more people to dry their clothes without electricity is ecologically unassailable. But I'm surprised that none of these items seem built to last, or that they'll even work that well. Maybe this is one of those categories where consumers just aren't willing to spend much money? In any case, I'd love to see if a class of ID students could come up with something better, given the natural constraints.