When Nicky Crawford, founder of Flowing With Blessings, came to Professor Steve Chininis with the concept of a mobile laundry, Chininis jumped at the chance to get his students involved. As he told the Technique, Chininis himself had grown to appreciate the “power of design for impact rather than profit,” and this project embodied that sentiment to the letter.
Flowing With Blessings is a nonprofit established in 2022 dedicated to aiding the unhoused in the Atlanta area. The mobile laundry, or “Wash Bus,” as its benefactors affectionately dubbed it, was the second part of a holistic effort to provide the unhoused with access to personal hygiene; the first was a series of shower trailers, which were already in use.
Crawford recognized a need for the Wash Bus when he noticed that after the people he served showered, they simply put their dirty clothes back on. Crawford’s initial solution was to provide new, clean clothes, but many remained attached to the clothes they came in with. Crawford realized that ownership was a point of dignity for those who he served. He wanted to protect and preserve that dignity to get the unhoused back on their feet.
Chininis’s team, comprised of five students from his summer industrial design studio, was tasked with the design, layout and functionality of the bus, which had actually started construction in the summer of 2023. The bus had to fit seven washing machines and seven dryers, in addition to space for volunteers to fold and organize clothes. The student team was to focus on the technical big picture: how do all the parts work together to create a fully functioning mobile laundry?
One of the biggest challenges the team faced was plumbing. It wasn’t a guarantee that the bus would be able to use water from an external source, so students had to figure out how to store clean water and get rid of dirty water; additionally, they wanted to minimize waste as much as possible on a limited budget.
The first solution they came up with was to place a tank on the top of the bus; this way, gravity would do the work and move water down to the machinery. However, after talking to experienced drivers, the team concluded that this would make the bus too impractical to maneuver. Professor Chininis described the students’ solution: “They decided to fit the tanks underneath the bus. They designed custom water tanks, and Nicky had them made.” This way, the bus’s center of gravity was lower to the ground.
Students were involved in this project from planning to execution; therefore, they were heavily invested in its result. They felt a certain ownership over the Wash Bus’s success, which motivated them to consider the project with a unique thoughtfulness. David Hounyo, fifth-year ID and a member of the Wash Bus Team, shared his understanding of the project’s nature. “I think work in industrial design can be very conceptual at times, so seeing the real-world effect of my work hit very close to home,” Hounyo said.
However, the corporeality of the project was a double-edged sword. “Since our work on this project had a very real impact, the solution we were providing was not something we could easily test,” Hounyo said.
The team could not make any major functionality mistakes because the prototype was also the final product. Additionally, they simply did not have the budget for error. Much of the funding for this project came from Crawford’s own pocket, so the team could not afford anything less than certainty in their choice of materials.
The problem of funding is unfortunately not an uncommon one in the nonprofit sphere. As operating costs rise, sustainability has become an issue for more and more organizations. Anushka Vaidya, fourth-year ID and another member of the team, names Flowing With Blessings’ lack of funding as one of the main limitations put on the mobile laundry project. She believes that one of the top priorities for the nonprofit right now is messaging. “I think one of the challenges was spreading the word about this organization and letting people know how they can help,” Vaidya said. She encourages anyone interested in giving back to their community to check out the Flowing With Blessings website for more information.
The Wash Bus currently runs about 60 loads of laundry in a day and can be found at Grady Memorial Hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 a.m. – 2 p.m. The Wash Bus and shower trailers have served an estimated 4000 unhoused people in Atlanta, and Crawford hopes this number will only grow. The next step for the project is to wrap the bus with a student-designed graphic; the team’s goal is to give the bus a visual identity that aligns it with Flowing with Blessings’ mission.
The reason these students chose the “Wash Bus” project over others presented to them in summer studio was for much the same reason that they chose Tech; it centered on a multidisciplinary approach to progress and placed weight on the value of community. The Wash Bus is one success story of many, proving that the humanized application of STEM will define our future.