For reasons that only a therapist could explain, I have an ongoing interest in the user interfaces we find in bathrooms. I was down visiting the good folks at Bootup Labs and discovered not one but two oddities in their office bathroom.
The first was the flush controls over the urinal. As you can see, there are two buttons:
If you click to view the big version, you’ll see that one button simply has a horizontal line on it.
Without going into visceral detail, such a setup makes sense for toilets. Liquid waste requires less flushing action than solid waste. It’s a smart innovation that saves a ton of water–I wish every toilet in North America already had two such buttons.
But urinals? What’s wrong with only using the ‘less water’ button? What’s the ‘more button’ for? Kidney stones?
The photo doesn’t do it justice. As my friend indicates, you can barely get your hands under the faucet. And much of the water inevitably slops over the edge of the sink. And Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if you ever want to shave at work.
These sinks just seem obstinately absurd. As if the designer said, “I reject that perfection that thousands of years of sink evolution has brought us. Shallow is the new deep!”
I was in a government building recently, and visited the bathroom. This odd graffiti was on the stall wall:
When you decipher the code, it reads “what is our duty”. This wasn’t the publicly accessible part of the building, so presumably this was written by a government worker. Is this a public servant asking his colleagues about their commitment? Or is he just making a bad pun on the term “doodie”?
I was reminded of a possibly apocryphal story in which a couple had an enormous water bill, and couldn’t figure out why. Eventually one of them stayed home sick, and discovered that their cat was an obsessive toilet flusher.
I was musing last night about what cats love about flushing the toilet. I figured that it was the total disconnection between cause and effect: “I do something up here, and something totally unexpected happens down there. And it’s noisy and swirling!”
I imagined a cat toy that comes in two parts:
A button or lever that sits flat on the ground, that’s easy for the cat to push on and engage.
A little battery-powered car, with big wheels outside its body so that it can run upside down or right-side up. It’s configured so that it tends to drive in circles, or certainly not only in a straight line. It makes noise when it moves. For extra points, it’s got a little brain in it that prevents it from driving too far away from the button.
When the cat pushes the button, the car jumps to life and drives around for, I don’t know, 45 seconds. The cat gets fascinated, and repeats ad nauseum.
Via Amber, I discovered the unusual design for Washlet.com, a site promoting a, uh, toilet. The site is more or less entirely comprised of little bits of video (note to designers: fix your title tags), discussing the pros and…well, just the pros, of their fancy new toilet.
The toilet-promoting monologues are hilarious because they’re so carefully worded. They never say the word ‘toilet’, and are constantly dancing around the actual nuts and bolts of our bodies and the device’s operations. I kind of feel for the poor actors–they seem so darned convinced of the Washlet’s awesomeness.
I’ve been watching the slow but steady rise of video-centric websites over the past few years. I actually don’t mind this approach at all. However, all of the information should be conveyed and easily available (and linkable) in text form. Why? Arguments for SEO aside, maybe I’m a verbal learner. Maybe I want to cut and paste a chunk to send to my bidet-obsessed friend. Maybe I want to blog about a particular product.
I actually prefer a hybrid model,with video naturally integrated into a text-based site. Coast Capital Savings and Steady Hand do this well.
I was reminded of an amusing Phillips campaign that I blogged about a while back, called Shave Everywhere. They’ve changed the content on that site, but the new stuff looks as good or better than the old.
I really dig nice hotels. I’m a Taurus, and apparently that makes me a sucker for luxury. I like old school hotels, and I like nice post-modern ones, too.
We’re staying at the Novotel Budpaest Danube, a four-star hotel that’s right on the river in Buda, directly across from the Hungarian parliament. In actuality, it’s not a particularly remarkable hotel, but they’ve done it up nice. It’s a very modern, comfortable business hotel, with all the amenities you’d expect. The staff speak good English (certainly not a requirement, but handy) and have been very friendly and helpful.
At first glance, the location looks a little dubious. It’s seemingly central, but most of the cool stuff in Budapest is either up in Buda Castle or across the river in Pest. Happily, the hotel is two minutes away from both the excellent metro system and a tram line. We’re big believers in using public transport when we visit big cities–driving is usually stressful, frustrating and expensive–and so the location has worked really well for us.
I enjoy modern European hotels because they’re often full of cool, tiny design features which I haven’t seen before. I’m not one to peruse House & Home magazine, so these may seem unremarkable to everybody else.
I really dug the anti-steam mirror. I guess the hot water tubes are run behind the central portion of the glass, and it never steams up. I also liked the nifty sink, where the counter just kind of melts smoothly into the basin:
In the toilet room, I enjoyed another playful design element. In many parts of the world, they divide the toilet’s flushing mechanism into two buttons. This is a clever water conservation strategy, as you need less flushing water for, uh, number one than for number two.
In this bathroom, they’ve kind of exploded the scale of the button (which is usually the size of a loonie and embedded in the top of the basin), rendering them as two stainless steel bubbles on the wall. Cool, eh?
This is a great example of how clever designers rethink ordinary things and show them to us in a new way.
