Derriere Thinking
I see examples of bad thinking in a plethora of places. One of my absolute pet hates, and an affront to funky thinking, is the design paradigm of toilet door knobs. There is a scandinavian school of thought in design and architecture called functionalism which was controversial in the sense that it suggested that both the form and the function of a designed object should support its purpose. This was controversial because previous design thinkers did not consider the ultimate purpose of an object. Clearly an old school thinker designed the stinky toilet door knobs we are now left with.
Let me explain. No longer is a public or a private toilet just a place where we dump the excesses of our consumption. In this right-brained world, where Phillippe Starck and Alessi design toilet brushes, where we take joy in the increasing appearance of oil burners in top restaurants, and feel priviliged to occasionally be using cotton hand towel as opposed to recycled sand-paper, we are still hamstrung in our toilet design thinking by those inverted toilet door knobs.
Imagine this, you have just been to the public bathroom at a nice conference centre, and in accordance with your regular yoga-induced bowel movement, have just completed a No 2. Because you’re a respectable person who values hygiene out of respect to yourself and your fellow citizens, you then wash your hands carefully, dry them to remove any spare bacteria and should the conference venue offer it, apply some metrosexual hand-lotion while nobody is looking. There is only one problem. You still need to get back to the break-out session that just started, and that door-knob stands between you and the latest management technique. Just as you approched the wash-basine to wash your hands you witnessed an overweight bike-gang member go straight from the No 2 section of the toilets to the door, smearing the door-knob in his cumulative bacteria. Enough detail already.
So the dilemma is this, you have just done the right thing by your and your fellow citizens, yet now risk not only off-setting your good behaviour with an unhealthy dose of someone else’s bacteria, but also spreading the compounded efforts of careless citizens to the break-out room. This dilemma could have been prevented by some funky thinking rather than the derriere thinking that created the design. You must in most toilet door instances pull on the door-knob, the central and only access point to the outside, thus annulling the point of washing your hands. Sure, you find ways around this - either you grab a paper towel and open the door this way, or you stand around waiting for someone to enter the public bathrooms so that you can sneak out without touching the door. My questions is this - ‘what if’ we had doors that were hinged to open outward, or maybe we had sensor-enabled doors, just like we have sensor-enabled wash bashins?
According to functionalism, both the form and function of door-knobs should be constructed with its purpose in mind. Some may say that the purpose originally was just to allow entry and exit into a bathroom, but in today’s world a toilet is not just a toilet - ask the guys at ‘Loo with a View’ on Australia’s Sunshine Coast -, SARS scares make us more hygiene aware, and the form and function of design need to be aligned. The toilet purpose has changed with time, and so does the thinking that informs the toilet door-knob form and function need to change with the times.
And just like this derriere thinking causes disease, and mental dis-ease in anal people like myself - can you be anal about hygiene, sounds like a contradiction in terms - the question is what toilet door knobs you have in your life?
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