In our blog’s grand tradition of posts about bathrooms and toilets, here’s a bit of local small-scale innovation, spied at a neighborhood coffee shop.
The explanatory sign in the bathroom
The product in use
Get yours here!
Related posts:
Steve investigates the bathroom for Core77
Fair warning
The toilet flusher that comes with a memo
Semiotics of toilet signs
Explaining your product puts you ahead of the pack
Yes, more bathroom blogging! Core77 has just posted a quick video I made
In this video for Core77, Steve Portigal takes us into his company bathroom, uncovering examples of bad design and its consequences.
From signage to artifact and back, people are forever mistaking their cues for how to behave, how to use products and systems, and how different, often-conflicting indicators cause our expectations and realities to collide. This 2-minute video is a priceless example. What’s in your bathroom?
We’ve posted previously on this blog about the signs people create to help others navigate unfamiliar situations.
Thus, as soon as I saw this beauty in a highway-side restroom, I started thinking about the picture I was going to take.
I vividly remember washing my hands and snickering to myself about the apparent complexity of the instructions, thinking, “what, are people getting trapped in here?”
A few seconds later, the timed light clicked off, and my attitude changed just as quickly as I found myself in darkness and completely unable to get the door open. Of course I hadn’t actually read the signs–just thought about them as “an example of . . . ”
I tried in vain to undo the door by feel and intuition, and started imagining how much it would suck to spend the night trapped in a highway-side restroom. After a bit of worst-case-scenario fantasizing, I used the light from my cell phone to illuminate the signs, which indeed, contained instructions absolutely essential to getting the door open.
Leaving me with two questions:
I found the whole experience amusing, but it really is kind of crazy that a public restroom is trapping people on the side of Highway 84.
Earlier this week I spent the day with the design team of a global technology company. I can’t say much more but I can share a couple of photographs from different bathrooms.
The standard soap dispenser has been repurposed for hand lotion. The soap comes from the other kind of standard dispenser, a foot away, next to the sink.
Washing your hands is a fairly unconscious behavior, you assess the space visually and quickly move through the various tasks…so who stops to read the sign that says Hand Lotion? That sign serves more of a “here’s how you messed up, buddy” explanation than as a preventative measure. I had a hard time stopping myself from getting hand lotion when I wanted soap.
We did have a group discussion about observing signs in the environment to identify workarounds and opportunities for improvement and so I was pleased to have an example from their environment to share back. This ended up in the always enjoyable men’s bathroom vs. women’s bathroom comparison…in this office the women’s bathroom includes a dispenser for hand sanitizer (in addition to soap and lotion). Unfortunately I didn’t get in there to take a picture. But, oh, the mode errors!
I was struck by the presumed need for this sign in a different bathroom, explaining what locked and unlocked look like. I had this quick “well that’s dumb” reaction, took the picture, used the facility, and then upon exiting realized that I had failed to lock the door! I’m not sure exactly how I managed to not lock it, since that is another automatic behavior.
In both cases, the signs themselves caught my attention, but I still exhibited the behavior they were trying to prevent (taking lotion instead of soap, leaving the door unlocked).
See also Signs To Override Human Nature, previously.
Bolts replacing missing handles, Omogari, San Jose, CA, November 2007
Sink handle too close to wall, Tully’s, Kyoto, Japan, January 2008
Foot wear at the JR service counter, Tokyo, Japan, December 2007
Public bathroom doorway, Karuizawa, Japan, January 2008
Before we hiked up the nearby mountain I wanted to use the bathroom. I was very frustrated to find the door locked. I pushed and pulled and saw the keyhole for the deadbolt and figured I was out of luck. Then I saw someone enter the adjacent women’s room – by sliding the door. I wouldn’t expect a bathroom door to slide, and I didn’t interpret any of the cues (or affordances) about how this door works to suggest sliding was a possibility.
We found these interesting calendars (Google translate link) in Japan. They contain different daily activities tied to the room that you’d use them in, including kitchen, bedroom, bathroom (i.e., the room you bathe in), and toilet. I liked that the toilet calendar features a happy individual, presumably using the calendar, sitting on the throne. The calendars offer a small peek into Japanese home life.
Recent political scandals have much to teach us.
…Officers wrote that they knew from their training and work experience that the foot-tapping was a signal used by people looking for sex.
…
After a man in the adjacent stall left, Craig entered it and put his luggage against the front of the stall door, “which Sgt. Karsnia’s experience has indicated is used to attempt to conceal sexual conduct by blocking the view from the front of the stall,” said the complaint.The complaint said Craig then tapped his right foot several times and moved it closer to Karsnia’s stall and then moved it to where it touched Karsnia’s foot. Karsnia recognized that “as a signal often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct,” the complaint said.
Assuming this is true (and recalling humorous-in-retrospect documents that we’ve all seen about law enforcement deconstructing hippies, punks, heavy metal, gangs, etc., it very way may not be), it’s cool to consider a signal that can only be interpreted by those that know what it means. To everyone else, it may not even penetrate your awareness. Until the communication is decoded, it’s almost perfect, especially for messages that may be risky.
I’m fascinated to consider that (maybe, just maybe) someone may have at some point tapped at me, and I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed and certainly not interpreted it as it’s presumably intended.