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Comment by AdamH12113 | Hacker News Reader

I have always found laundry symbols confusing. I agree with other comments that this proposed replacement has too many problems to be acceptable, but surely someone can do better than "crossed-out triangle", "underlined water cup", "Cylon wearing a jaunty cap", and my personal favorite, "literally just a circle".

Weird fact: Despite having been around for decades, laundry symbols have not been assigned Unicode code points. This mailing list email from Ken Whistler in 2003[1] suggests the existence of a conflicting Canadian standard as a reason, along with a philosophy of not including "icons" (especially color-coded ones!) in a "character" set, given that pictographic language is likely to change over the next century.

(Unicode threw that out the window in 2010 when they standardized emojis, and given how complex emojis have become Ken's argument is sounding better and better...)

[1] http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2003-m06/0274.html

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There's nothing wrong with the symbols. Your washing machine is the one that should have a printed table of them somewhere.

Take a look on those symbols: "A", "B", "C". A triangle with the basis moved up, two circles with a straight side, and an open circumference arc. They were abstract into complete meaningless, yet they are great for their use-case.

> Your washing machine is the one that should have a printed table of them somewhere.

Neither of my laundry machines have any symbols on their control panels, only printed English. The only symbols I can find on them are the Explosion, Fire, and Shock warning stickers inside the rim of the doors.

I think OP meant "should" as in "ought to" not "should" as in "probably does."

fwiw the Roman alphabet seems pretty suboptimal and the impossibility of switching is an example of a coordination problem, as opposed to an example of optimal design

Are the benefits of an improvement worth the cost?

Do you know how to do your laundry despite not knowing how to read the symbols?

I wash all my laundry on cold and dry on low heat because I'm fat and don't want my clothes to shrink. I have eight of the same black cotton T-shirt. I do not separate my laundry. I do not wear any exotic fabrics, designer clothes, or bright colors, and if I did, I would wash them in the same load of laundry as my other clothes. I am not a benchmark for laundry ability. Maybe there's some easy, incremental improvement I could make. But the current symbols do not help me do that.

All I'm saying is that maybe, with the full power of graphic design, we could have something a little more self-explanatory than triangle = bleach, circle = dry clean. The iron symbol is perfectly clear, for instance.

>Maybe there's some easy, incremental improvement I could make. But the current symbols do not help me do that.

I'd be curious what the users of the labels think. If they exist.

> we could have something a little more self-explanatory than triangle = bleach, circle = dry clean. The iron symbol is perfectly clear, for instance.

I think you (and others) are focusing on the wrong thing here. Are you likely to bleach your black t-shirts? Are you likely to dry clean them?

No, certainly not, these are special, rather uncommon processes that are unlikely to be part of one's daily washing routing, and therefore it doesn't really matter if they're not immediately obvious.

The washing and ironing temperature, as well as the hand wash symbol, are the ones that actually matter and they're also quite obvious. The tumble dry symbols are maybe less obvious and common enough today, they probably seemed like they were one of the less common processes back in the 70's in France (where tumble driers are only just beginning to be common today). I'm pretty sure you should ignore the "no tumble dry" symbols most of the time anyway if your tumble drier is more recent than the 70's. That's what I do.

So if you just ignore the symbols you don't understand, in most cases and for most people, everything will be fine and you will simply know what maximum temperature to wash your clothes.

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