Filling a clothing iron with water is not one of my favorite activities. It's usually a clumsy procedure that you have to perform quite often because you have to empty the water out of a clothing iron after use. Otherwise the iron gets rusty on the inside, and that rusty water would then shoot out the next time and spoil your clothes. Now that's one thing I would like: a clothing iron that I do not have to empty every time.

On the clothing iron pictured above there's another issue: you have to fill the iron horizontally (left) but to check the water level you have to hold it vertically (right). One would say that clothing irons do not need interaction designers, but in this case some degree of interaction design might have prevented an annoying issue.
The smart iron
On the other hand, the Oliso Smart Iron takes the usability of ironing to the next level: it lifts itself when you release the handle. I thought it was not that much of a fuss to stand the iron on its end when you're done, but if you're willing to pay $129 you certainly have a remarkable iron that solves an issue that you may not have realized you had (isn't that ironic?). But to make the issue cleas Oliso has put a nice home-shopping like movie on youtube.



[photo via Christelle, Oliso iron via Bright]