Interview with Laura Tuck, engineer and R&D Team Lead at The Washing Machine Project
Laura Tuck is an engineer and R&D Team Lead at The Washing Machine Project – a start-up with a mission to alleviate the burden of handwashing clothes.
They are also among several businesses working with the Design & Technology Association’s Inspired By Industry initiative to rejuvenate curriculum content for the subject in schools to support growing the next generation of talent in creative industries.
What’s your career background?
I am the R&D team lead at The Washing Machine Project – a start-up with a mission to alleviate the burden of handwashing clothes. Five billion people worldwide cannot access a washing machine, so clothes are washed by hand.
This is a time-consuming process that causes pain and skin damage and also wastes water. We are tackling this problem by designing, manufacturing and distributing manual washing machines. I lead a small but agile team of four designers and engineers to create these products.
I always knew I wanted to design products that would make a positive impact on people’s lives. Before joining The Washing Machine Project, I joined Elvie – a femtech start-up that had already made a name for itself in female empowerment with its pelvic floor trainer.
Joining the company during the COVID pandemic was a crazy experience, both professionally and personally. I joined a new team that I hadn’t met in real life for 3 months. Together, we worked on two new Elvie products: the Catch and Curve.
I ended up with a spare bedroom full of breast pumps and silicone boobs and we would ferry prototypes between us from one doorstep to another. Thankfully company culture made this system work. I remain proud of the products that we created; I still gift them to every new mum that I know.
Another innovation I’m proud to have worked on was Peequal, which had the ambition of solving the inequality in toilet facilities for women. Women can wait up to 34 times longer than men to use the toilet yet existing public facilities are insufficient in meeting women’s needs.
Peequal was set up to tackle the long queues that typically snake out of women’s public lavatories by mobilising women’s urinals, especially at festivals and large sporting events. The impact of these products ignited within me a real passion in design for female empowerment; a thread I have kept throughout my career. This experience also showed me what small teams of ambitious people are truly capable of.
I loved school. For me, it was a great opportunity to explore subjects and discover where my passions lie. I was lucky enough to have some incredible role models as teachers. But, reflecting on the career guidance I received, there certainly were missed opportunities. I don’t think I had career aspirations per se; rather, career resignations – I was good at maths and was resigned to either becoming an accountant or a maths teacher. I didn’t know what else I could do with this skill. The possibilities were neither explored nor explained to me.
That said, design and technology teachers were, for me, the most inspirational. I would never have become an engineer without them. They allowed me to spend free periods in their workshops developing passion projects such as making architectural models or repairing musical instruments. I always looked forward to spending time in the design & technology workshop above anything else at school.
How do you spread the word about what you do?
As TWMP, a lot of our visibility grows through organic interest, especially on social media. The human impact of what we do resonates deeply, and when people see the difference our machines make in communities, they’re eager to share those stories. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn have become powerful tools for spreading the word, and some of our most meaningful connections and relationships have emerged from these platforms.
People engage with the real-life impact of our work, and the personal nature of those stories allows them to spread widely. While partnerships, like our collaboration with Whirlpool, help amplify our message, the most powerful advocacy comes from the organic sharing by individuals touched by our mission.
We’ve also been fortunate enough to be featured by international news outlets, which has expanded our reach even further. Coverage in major media platforms has brought attention to the challenges we’re tackling and the innovative solutions we’re providing. This exposure has attracted support from individuals and organisations worldwide who are passionate about making a difference.
As an individual, I try to represent our amazing team as much as possible to demonstrate the impact a career in engineering can have. With a 50% female engineering team, I think we set a very good example for how much a diverse team can deliver- something that is showcased in the D& association inspired by Industry project
What’s been the biggest career obstacle you’ve had to overcome?
I do believe that design & technology is the victim of academic snobbery. Despite having a real passion in this area, I was discouraged from studying Resistant Materials at GCSE as well as an engineering BTEC because they were perceived as ‘not academic enough’. Due to my academic profile, there was also a heavy emphasis on me pursuing traditional, ‘highly ranked’ universities without much exploration of alternative paths which in hindsight would have suited me much better.
Upon leaving school I didn’t have a very good understanding of the different strands of engineering, such as mechanical, structural or aerospace. I decided to study at Cambridge as the course gave me two years of studying general engineering before specialising.
Within two years, I realised that the more academic courses were not for me. I wanted more industrial exposure. So I changed to manufacturing engineering – a more varied course that saw me working on some great projects – from programming a robotic production line to optimising baked bean manufacturing, running route cause analysis for Jaguar Land Rover and travelling to Japan to study the social impact of automation.
It was the design aspect of the course that captured my imagination. Applying creativity to mathematics and scientific elements of engineering was what made this experience especially exciting for me.
During my degree, I did an internship at Dyson and it was an incredible experience. Its laboratories, workshops and prototyping facilities offered me a new world of exposure to the design cycle, plus I had so many brilliant design engineers to look up to. I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship from Dyson and returned as a Graduate engineer after my degree.
I stayed at Dyson for over two years, developing products such as the Dyson Humidify+Cool but the challenges of working for a large corporation soon became apparent to me. Despite working on the product for a year, it was hard to point to anything that really had my fingerprints on it. Every element had been passed through so many designers that my voice was lost in the design process. I knew, in the long term, that I wanted to work somewhere small enough where design ownership and impact are tangible and accountable.
And your proudest moment so far?
Seeing the ripple effect of something I designed has been incredible. At The Washing Machine Project, the product itself was redesigned from the ground up, and I owned the majority of that design, right up until the first batch production. I have taken those machines and distributed them to schools, orphanages, community centres and individual households across Uganda and India. It has been a job that has taken me to many parts of the world.
In the early stages of the product trial, we created a pop-up laundrette at a community centre in Kampala, Uganda, for the families of children with disabilities. This community provided education and medical support for the children as well as supporting the mothers to create businesses washing clothes for people in the locality and generating income.
At the start of our day, the women were sceptical, asking many questions about how the machine worked, its efficacy and longevity. By the end of the first wash, all of the women had disappeared and I was disappointed to think they had lost interest so quickly. However, a few minutes later they reappeared with bags of washing that they wanted to put in the machine and begged us to stay longer. We stayed all day and eventually donated the machine to the centre so that they could become our long-term trialists, helping us improve the machine even further.
The technology has freed up more time for mothers to spend with their children, helped them generate income to gain financial independence and alleviated the pain from hours of hand washing clothes. Since then, we have grown our production more than 10 times. And this is just the beginning. With our recently announced partnership with Whirlpool, we aim to impact a further 150,000 lives over the next five years.
Why is work so important to you?
It’s widely understood that the world is not designed for women. Gender biases pervade the structure of products. However, innovations, particularly in femtech, are bringing this to light and redressing the balance. I am passionate about making a tangible social impact, particularly in empowering women, through engineering and design.
Whether it’s developing breast pumps, pelvic floor trainers, or even everyday items like urinals and washing machines, I see each product as an opportunity to enhance women’s lives. Technology for women has been underserved for far too long, presenting many opportunities to revolutionise the current landscape. I’m proud to be a part of that movement.
While female engineers have increasingly been profiled and celebrated for their achievements, the engineering industry does suffer from a diversity problem in every aspect. In my career, I have certainly experienced the microaggressions of being one of only a few women in a design team being overlooked or excluded from discussions, despite playing a major role in projects. Division and disparities all start at the grassroots. Less academic snobbery within the industry would open avenues into engineering for prospects coming from a much broader range of backgrounds.
For me, the purpose and importance of my work are threefold: I do want to make a difference in people’s lives, particularly within in-need communities but I also think there is a job to be done in improving representation within the design and technology fields as well as nurturing talent at the grassroots. Not enough parents nor children understand or appreciate the value a D&T education can bring to wider society, but in a world with many unfolding challenges – climate change, an ageing population and pandemics, to name a few – innovation will be key to tackling and curtailing major global catastrophes.
School can be a very poor replica of the real world, which is why it’s important that disciplines, like design & technology, are contextually framed in a real-life setting where young students can see how the subject is relevant to actual jobs and is applied to real life.
The Washing Machine Project, working with the Design & Technology Association’s Inspired By Industry initiative, is working hard to make this happen by providing classroom materials and real design briefs so that children are challenged creatively to ideate solutions to existing, everyday problems – particularly within in-need communities. For example, we set a brief for designing a laundry solution for children at a school in Uganda, which challenges students to think about the collection of water, the cleaning process and the drying of the clothes.
To inspire and support creative thinking, we provided videos demonstrating our design and testing processes so that students can really engage with the task. This level of context was certainly missing in my design & technology education at school. Perhaps if more children could see what the point of studying design & technology is, there might be more interest and uptake in the subject.
Who inspires you?
I’m continually inspired by the resilience and creativity of the people we serve. Whether it’s a mother in Uganda who transforms the time saved from handwashing into new entrepreneurial ventures, or the community leaders using our technology to benefit entire villages, their stories keep me grounded and motivated.
I also draw immense inspiration from the incredible founders I’ve worked with. Tania Boler of Elvie, for example, showed me how powerful femtech innovation can be in changing lives, and Amber Probyn & Hazel McShane of Peequal demonstrated how bold ideas can solve real-world inequalities. These women have all pushed boundaries and created lasting change, and I’m proud to have been a part of their journeys.
How do you achieve work-life balance?
It’s definitely a challenge, especially in a start-up where the lines can blur between work and personal life. What helps me is finding purpose in what I do – it doesn’t always feel like “work” when you’re genuinely passionate about the mission.
But I’ve also learned the importance of setting boundaries. I make time for activities that recharge me, like hiking, cooking, and spending time with friends and family. Creating a balance between focusing on personal well-being and professional goals is something I’m always working on, and it’s an ongoing process of adjustment.
What are your three top pieces of advice for someone wanting to do something similar?
1) People would rather that something happened imperfectly than if it didn’t happen at all
That’s the best advice I’ve ever been given. I used to focus so much on being perfect and learning everything before even attempting to put ideas into action that nothing would happen at all. I’m in an industry where you can’t know everything because it has never been done before. You just have to persevere, learn as you go and give it your best shot. It may not be perfect but it’s better than inaction.
2) Care about what you do and the impact it has
And the worst piece of advice? You need to care less. I was told this in multiple jobs before my current one – that I was too emotionally involved in projects. I know many engineers, particularly women, who have been told this too.
Some people might just see a job as a job. For me, this is my greatest opportunity to have an impact on the world around me. I do care about that and I should care about that. I think if more people cared more about what they do for 40 hours a week we would be in a much better place.
3) Get experience
Finally, to anyone interested in working within the design and innovation fields, particularly in engineering, I recommend taking up internships, volunteer work, and shadowing professionals in these fields. For me, this certainly helped strengthen my interests and clarified my passions.
