Automatic flushing toilets were either not designed with women in mind, or not tested extensively on women before they were deployed in millions of bathrooms across America.
Without getting into graphic detail, let’s just say that sometimes there are “other things” that women are trying to do when they are on the toilet besides simply relieving themselves, flushing, and going. Sometimes these “things” take a little bit of time and a little bit of agility. How that movement doesn’t get translated into a “she’s finished now, it’s time to flush” signal to the toilet is too technical for me, but that’s exactly what happens (sometimes multiple times in one “sitting”). The best result is a lot of wasted water, the worst is a toilet that splashes a little too high while it’s flushing and the toilet ceases to be a toilet but something more akin to a bedet.
Now if you’d asked me my opinion on the subject a few weeks ago, I would’ve stopped there. Until then I’d thought the automatic flowing faucet to be a relatively harmless invention, until, after getting off an 8:00AM flight on my way to DC to see a client, I dared to try to put on my makeup in front of a mirror that was hanging over one of these sinks. I guess just standing there (and leaning forward to get as close to the mirror as possible) was enough to keep turning the damn thing on and off, on and off…I tried to find a lone mirror (one that didn’t have a sink under it) but there wasn’t one. So instead I just had to stand there like a water-wasting asshole while I tried to rush through my makeup application as quickly as possible.
The summary here should be pretty obvious – we are not robots. (I can image that men have complaints about these mechanisms too.) Assuming that the interaction with an appliance like this will be a simple three-step process that’s the same every time seriously over simplifies its utility and ignores the larger space in which it exists. It’s as though the appliances were designed in a vaccuum, with no consideration as to how that space is used in a multitude of ways.
2 Responses to Robot Bathrooms (or Why I Hate Automatic Toilets )
Don Norman takes these things to task in DOET if I’m not mistaken. A robot toilet in some way is the pinnacle of the industrial age. It’s not especially surprising either that the market leader in mechanistically distancing us from our effluvium is from Japan.
Not to mention the psychological traumatization of diminutive female children (little girls), who have not been consulted in the design of these robot toilets. I’ve overheard on numerous occasions the fright and terror of a little toddler behind the closed stall with her mom attempting to reassure her that the toilet would not drown her or suck her down into the abyss. All the while, the doggone toilet is flushing and spraying incessantly. How can we toilet train little ‘uns with this kind of trauma?