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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

I always laugh when I see that "unclear laundry icons" image, because I recently had the experience of trying to use a combined washer/dryer machine in a foreign country. The icons truly are asinine, you can't even get close to guessing what you want.

For fun, I looked it up. Some of the icons are obvious, a few make sense once you know the basics, and still others seem almost sillier once explained.

http://www.textileaffairs.com/lguide.htm

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Well, I'm not sure I'd call them "asinine". Like any icon set, they require a bit of learning—they're not necessarily meant to be immediately recognizable to a first time user. They address a different problem: it's simply impractical to print laundry + care instructions in all 24 official EU languages (or even just a few of the most common ones) on a tag the size of a postage stamp.

European road signs[1] are another example where text labels wouldn't be practical. Many of the symbols are meaningless in and of themselves, but you of course pick up their meaning pretty quickly when you're learning to drive. If you're an American driving over here for the first time, you wouldn't expect to automatically understand the system without first at least glancing at a travel guide or some other reference.

All that said, I do think it sucks that the whole laundry symbol system is copyrighted.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_symbol#National_and_in...

I encountered this machine, which had a manual on top, hooray! But it didn't include explanations of any of the symbols:

https://imgur.com/Sdwrvqv

I ended up going for "40 degrees shirts and pants" since that matched what I was actually trying to wash, but God help anyone trying to use that machine with any specific requirements.

"aws 51012 labels" brought this as the first result:

http://docs.whirlpool.eu/_doc/W10802912EN.pdf

The standardized laundry icons are way better than the alternative (no standard icons, or verbose text in a potentially foreign language).

If you're in a location where that language is spoken, it's probably reasonable to assume you have a method of translation available (like a dictionary). It's much harder to look up icons. You could try to make an exception for laundry, but you'll encounter so many different interfaces over the course of the day, and if they all had their own icon language it would be hopeless. Text is much more universal.

Doing laundry in Poland, I was grateful for the standard icons, whose meaning a quick Google search revealed.

Thanks, I came in here looking for that. Here are some more explanations: http://www.davisimperial.com/resources/care_lables.html

I assume the "No Christmas Crackers" symbol means "Do Not Wring Out".

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