‘Interaction Design’ Archives
Unforgiving Design – Urinals
This is the urinal I used at GOMA today.
There is very little room for mistake with urinals of this sort.
When you are in the act of urinating, you must ensure that the stream is at an angle that will not cause a splashback.
As you run out of pee, the stream becomes less and less powerful until it becomes a trickle. This trickle will tend to end up falling right into the urinal which then results in you getting pee splattered all over your shoes, or even worse… your feet if you are wearing thongs.
You don’t even feel like you can do the flick off because you worry that you will end up getting splattered more than you already have.
This is bad enough when you are alone, but when the urinal gets crowded, you have to watch out because someone might get splattered. Or ever worse. Someone will splash you.
In modern history, millions of urinals must have been designed and produced, with many hundreds of millions of people pissing in them every day.
So how is it that such a basic flaw could ever have been overlooked?
