This new over-engineered clothing system will dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend sorting clothes out of the dryer!

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The Issue:

Washing machines and clothes dryers save an immense amount of time. But there’s still a significant bottleneck in the pipeline from “dryer” → “pile of clothes” → “dresser / closet”: specifically, the process of actually identifying each article of clothing (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: This pile of clothes has been recently extracted from a dryer. We’d like to sort all of the clothes by type, but it’s quite unclear: is this tiny scrap of blue fabric part of a shirt? Or a weird sock? Or the end of a pair of jeans? Who knows! We must laboriously extract the entire garment in order to find out.

Before the pile of clothes can be sorted and put away, the clothes-washing individual will need to identify each article of clothing, but there’s no straightforward way to do this from just a casual glance at the pile

Proposal:

The solution is incredibly simple: just color-code all your clothing based on where it should be stored (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: These color-coded dresser drawers show how easy the clothes-sorting process can be. Just match the colors!

Future Work:

This system could be applied in other ways as well. For example, suppose a family has three children (who never share clothes, and I guess never receive hand-me-downs either): each child could be assigned a particular color of clothing to facilitate efficient sorting when everything is washed together in a single batch.

PROS: Makes it possible to immediately identify all clothes in a pile from even the tiniest visible corner. Might make it possible to more easily use a computer vision system and robot arm to automatically sort clothing.

CONS: Limits one’s fashion options somewhat, but this is a small price to pay for the increased efficiency.

Originally published 2026-06-01.