The Private Lives of Public Bathrooms

25 Apr 2014 • theatlantic.com

To discover this, one researcher hid in a bathroom stall and watched men at the urinals through a periscope, timing the “delay and persistence” of urination when a confederate came into the bathroom and stood right next to or one urinal removed from the unknowing participant. The closer the confederate was, the longer the delay before the man was able to go, and the less time he peed overall. Whether he would have been able to go at all had he known someone was spying on him through a periscope, no one can say.

Wow.  The lengths some will go to in the pursuit of research.

“I’ve been on a lot of building committees for major university buildings, and the thing that is least talked about is the public restroom,” he says. “If someone were to bring it up, it would cause giggles…In architecture firms, the lowest-ranking person designs the bathroom.”

That strikes me as pretty lame.  I wonder what the experienced designers could come up with if given an opportunity.

This unwillingness to seriously discuss public restroom design can stifle innovation, and leads to the relatively homogenous bathrooms we see in most buildings...

Imagine if we had as much innovation in bathrooms as we find in computers or cell phones.  I bet the bathroom would be unrecognizable from what it was 15 years ago.