I’m going to take a temporary break from writing about design transformations to writing about designs that I like, dislike, or find strange. This entry is about the latter.

This is a picture of the washing machine in my apartment in Bangalore. As you can see, it has “fuzzy logic” control. I seem to remember that fuzzy logic was a buzzword, what 8 years ago? Since no one who’s going to buy this washing machine actually knows what fuzzy logic means it’s purely a marketing term. I wasn’t sure of the meaning myself. My guess before looking it up on wikipedia was that it had something to do with machine learning or heuristics. Well, surprisingly enough the wikipedia article has a whole section of the application of fuzzy logic to washing machines, and I was partially right. It seems that fuzzy logic is a set of heuristics that map from non-discrete sensor data to actions. I think in the US we’d call this “Auto”.

The Water Level button cycles between High, Medium, Low, and Extra Low (what’s the difference between Low and Extra Low?) and the course button lets you select between Fuzzy, Speedy, Rinse, and Spin. I can just think of the user thinking “Hmm, I don’t need my clothes washed speedily (will that compromise on quality?) so I’ll just have them washed fuzzily. But will this cause more lint?”

Another weird thing is that the pressing the Water Level button cycles upwards among the water level options while the Course button cycles the other way.

Lastly, this washing machine has a Power button which is separate from the Start button. Mechanical washing machines never had the need for this. Is it to save electricity?

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Categories: Bad design