Great post. I once took a dump at the Borgata casino in a bathroom with heavy full-length wood doors and thick walls—even an ashtray to boot! Sat with a Marlboro and my phone, I was as a God.
Great write-up, though I’d say bathroom design has absolutely been rewarded for gas stations like Buc-ees, where the entire complex is built around large, well-equipped, and purposefully staffed restrooms. There are privacy dividers between urinals, and all toilets are behind floor-to-ceiling walls and a door that has an oversized deadbolt with open/closed indicators. Take everything else out of a Buc-ees and people will still prefer it over any other travel stop just for the bathrooms. Why this hasn’t been replicated at every travel stop across the world is just wild to me.
But your point stands - “psychological engineering” and a Museum of some kind is much needed in many areas. We get used to this in the IT world with UI/IX design because it’s required for user adoption, but the person designing a new door must really be kicking themselves for working in a market that only rewards how many units they can sell, rather than how many people’s lives they make more pleasant through daily interaction.
Under your definition of “psychological engineering," porta-potties contain advanced technology: the interior door lock rotates a little dial, visible above the handle from the outside, that toggles between a green “VACANT” to a red “OCCUPIED.”
It’s not colorblind-friendly, but it’s a massive improvement over the alternative. Porta-potties have other design problems (spiders, unbelievable stench, the Blue Splash of Death if you’re lucky enough to find one that’s lightly-used) but I’ve always respected whatever thoughtful designer included a simple “I’m here, let me poop in peace!” device on the door. Or maybe they stole the idea from airplane bathrooms, who knows.
(Reposted comment from your repost note a month ago)
The profit motive still applies to this area. Norman doors inconvenience people, but not enough for property owners to care since people eventually figure the doors out, and the inconvenience is quickly forgotten (though this is billions and billions of seconds of frustration that can be avoided with better design). Or worse, door-users blame themselves or call themselves stupid for bad design, and take on the responsibility for a problem that they actually aren't responsible for. And what humans don't notice, can't measure, or don't respect, like 5 seconds of inconvenience, we don't care for, though everything does adds up.
As a web designer, I'm shocked by how many sites have terrible design, and make information hard to find, especially government websites like the IRS. This is because design doesn't really matter here, people who are going to pay their taxes, are going to pay their taxes, and how quickly or frustration-free they are able to navigate the IRS website is irrelevant to the government - the government is going to get their money from law-abiding tax-payers anyways, so they simply don't care to make their website better.
You know what websites have great design? Scam websites. Scam websites work best on technology-illiterate/"gullible" people, either the extremely young, or extremely old. And by definition, technology illiterate people struggle to find the information/settings they want on their devices, so even if they fall for a scam, scammers find that these technology-illiterate groups will struggle to give scammers their information, the victims can't navigate the site and give the scammers their info.
So scammers solved this problem with great design. The "click here!" button is giant, green, wiggles aggressively to attract attention. They use all the psychological tricks of showing human faces and testimonials, even though they're made up. And the tricks and design works, and scammers get the info they want.
I am not so convinced in the idea of a museum, or rather I think it appeals to people who already find design appealing, and the people who are holding society back by disrespecting design, do not go anywhere near museums. In order for us to compete with corporations and politicians, we need to adopt their tactics. Yes, we need advertisements with Lebron James and swimsuit models to make design sexy
Interesting but a bit misunderstood perhaps upon reflection. Doors in high traffic generally need to open into the flow of traffic successively until people completely exit a building so that, for instance, a heavily occupied room where a fire starts, you don’t have to open the door inward against the pressure of a crowd fleeing, nor do you need to do so in hallways leading to egress.
Doors with a plate instead of a handle allow for little or no control over the door swing. Misunderstood? I’ve always assumed doors swing “out” since childhood in the US, and was generally never surprised by a handle. I was stymied when I lived in Europe. Doors swinging out = good design to me, door handles for control = good design to me. Signage, entirely different issue.
As for toilets in general there’s an entirely different double design magic at O’Hare airport. Men’s stall doors generally open inward, following the general rule that for low occupancy areas doors can open inward. If a fire starts in a stall [ insert joke about burning sensations or burning smells ] there’s no group of people crushing to get out. However, many people travel with roll bags. A door opening inward with rolling the roll bag inside with you is ridiculously clumsy compared to a stall door opening outward. The extra dumb magic at O’Hare compared to many airports is that for some reason the toilets themselves are quite shallow. At least in the notorious Dutch Shelf toilets in Holland and German the front well is deep. https://www.reddit.com/r/cursedcomments/comments/spwkjp/cursed_turd/ But due to bowl dangle dimensions of my own equipment I have found the shallow O’Hare model guarantees genital baptism. To paraphrase a naked preposition split-infinitive Star-Trek slogan:
“To [bowldly] go where no hung man has gone before.”
And let’s not forget the genius of Buckminster Fuller who determined many decades ago that road designers should bank the curves on freeway off-ramps. People for some reason were too foolish to slow down sufficiently and frequently flipped their cars on the off-ramps (imagine that, and in the pre seat belt days) and the results were often fatal. He suggested good design works where good judgement does not, and saved many lives.
Psychological engineering doesn't exist because most product design emerges from low empathy hierarchies. Because the people inside don't even know it exists, and if they did, it's not persistent with them. Any advice/patterns that are innovative die out -- there is no memetic persistence. Even if someone discovers a better way.
We just got off three years of authorities prescribing isolation for every problem faced by humans. It was cruel, and made lots of people suffer, and some irreversibly crazy. We still cannot talk about it -- instead we want to talk about Corsi-Rosenthal boxes. Doesn't that tell you something about the solution designers? Especially considering NONE of it worked? https://empathy.guru/2021/07/19/the-structural-memetics-of-masks/
Thanks for this article. My big design bugbear (thankfully now disappearing in NZ) is courtesy of those clever signwriters who printed signs backwards so they can be read in the mirror of the car ahead of you in traffic. Effectively that means thousands of drivers in the other lane coming towards you are all wondering what the heck a REBMULP is, while that single driver ahead can see that you are a plumber.
IDEO built an entire empire on the notion that all innovation should be prototyped and given to users before commercialization. And yet this rarely happens overall. It happens most routinely in food manufacturing, considered the least design oriented industry there is...which is not really true.
"In refugee camps the world over, many toilet and sanitary blocks are unlighted, unsafe, and not secure – especially for women and girls. Blocks of toilets are often affected by broken doors and locks, and placed in proximity to or within view of male facilities. With more than 1% of the world’s population now living in displacement, improvements to sanitation and safety in refugee camp settings will keep people safer and more secure.
In order to increase toilet usage, feelings of safety and security, and reduce incidents, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) are searching for new solutions with which to retrofit existing toilets around lighting, locking, and alerting. The IRC are looking to provide a tamper-proof lock, renewable-powered lighting, and data monitoring to toilet facilities in displacement camps." $30K challenge: https://irc.community.wazoku.com/challenge/a4f23bd110394a2b87f1cad0ddc2d869?utm_campaign=Female%20Toilets
So, do toilet doors not have a vacant/engaged indicator where you are? Usually pretty standard here. Only difficulty arises if the lock is busted and the place is busy enough for someone to risk it. Then a gentle nudge to the door will usually give you a good idea of whether it is occupied...
Doors in general though can go fuck themselves. As with a lot of design we interact with on a daily basis much can be done with standardisation. Traffic lights work brilliantly because everyone knows what the coloured lights mean, or can understand them based on their position in the stack. If every door in a public corridor had a handle if it was pull, or a metal plate thingy if it was push, that'd be good. If this was expanded so that with double doors, every door as you walk along the for e.g. left had side of the corridor was push, that'd be brilliant. Apply standardisation to phone chargers, password setting requirements, and self-checkout till design for e.g. and you're winning.
I once worked for an organisation that facilitated input from disabled people into the design of light rail transport systems etc., and it was enlightening to see how their perspectives were gathered, analysed, and then heavily compromised with competing demands in the design process. It didn't mean that the end result was terrible for those groups - the UK has a number of standardised approaches to accessibility that ensure on a general level that wheelchair users and those with sensory impairments stand a better chance of being able to use the thing safely, but there will always be a lot of people who face barriers to using all of it most of the time. And as someone under the height of 5'4" I still have to endure my arm being pulled out by it's socket if I need to use a hanging strap thing on the metro.
I do wonder how this kind of thing varies across the world, with for e.g. Japan springing to mind. Those toilets that wash your bum and flush automatically or the diagonal pedestrian crossing could only have been produced by a culture that values good public design surely?
ok what the heck I cannot stop trying to figure out wtf this Museum of Design is...like it feels like a film set for what a museum's website would look like but nothing on it is real lol
I did eventually find an award sign up screen https://competition.adesignaward.com/ and it seems like time is running out and I am pretty sure they charge you to apply?
I was trying to figure out if its a legit competition even and looked at the jury which is listed at the website https://awardjury.com/ !!! how the hell did they get that url
i feel like i understand nothing about this, less than i did when I started, and I must now commit my life to figuring it out
Ugh, this museum idea made me so excited! I think I said, "oh man that's such a good idea" quietly to myself, as I sat here, pooping in the privacy of my own home.
Have you ever visited the Corning Museum of Glass in New York? I think it has a similar effect to what you describe. We take glass massively for granted, but the history and technology we've developed over hundreds of years around it is mindblowing. It seems sortof banal, like how interesting could glass be? But it really changed the way I look at the world. Easily my favorite museum.
Interestingly, I just listened to a podcast episode about an area of design that does have measurable impacts: web design. I’ve been a student of web usability for some time. It’s an area where you can demonstrate results in metrics like CRO (conversion rate optimization), which translates into real dollars and cents. THAT gets people’s attention.
Single ply toilet paper should be illegal. It contravenes the Geneva Conventions. If I ran a building, owned company I would never never never stock the bathrooms with single ply toilet paper. What message does it send to your customers and employees by supplying them with single ply at one of their most intimate and vulnerable moments of the day? And moments after someone walking in on them pooping!
Great post. I once took a dump at the Borgata casino in a bathroom with heavy full-length wood doors and thick walls—even an ashtray to boot! Sat with a Marlboro and my phone, I was as a God.
Great write-up, though I’d say bathroom design has absolutely been rewarded for gas stations like Buc-ees, where the entire complex is built around large, well-equipped, and purposefully staffed restrooms. There are privacy dividers between urinals, and all toilets are behind floor-to-ceiling walls and a door that has an oversized deadbolt with open/closed indicators. Take everything else out of a Buc-ees and people will still prefer it over any other travel stop just for the bathrooms. Why this hasn’t been replicated at every travel stop across the world is just wild to me.
But your point stands - “psychological engineering” and a Museum of some kind is much needed in many areas. We get used to this in the IT world with UI/IX design because it’s required for user adoption, but the person designing a new door must really be kicking themselves for working in a market that only rewards how many units they can sell, rather than how many people’s lives they make more pleasant through daily interaction.
Under your definition of “psychological engineering," porta-potties contain advanced technology: the interior door lock rotates a little dial, visible above the handle from the outside, that toggles between a green “VACANT” to a red “OCCUPIED.”
It’s not colorblind-friendly, but it’s a massive improvement over the alternative. Porta-potties have other design problems (spiders, unbelievable stench, the Blue Splash of Death if you’re lucky enough to find one that’s lightly-used) but I’ve always respected whatever thoughtful designer included a simple “I’m here, let me poop in peace!” device on the door. Or maybe they stole the idea from airplane bathrooms, who knows.
(Reposted comment from your repost note a month ago)
LOL. Again, so funny! Dare I wade into the comments?
The profit motive still applies to this area. Norman doors inconvenience people, but not enough for property owners to care since people eventually figure the doors out, and the inconvenience is quickly forgotten (though this is billions and billions of seconds of frustration that can be avoided with better design). Or worse, door-users blame themselves or call themselves stupid for bad design, and take on the responsibility for a problem that they actually aren't responsible for. And what humans don't notice, can't measure, or don't respect, like 5 seconds of inconvenience, we don't care for, though everything does adds up.
As a web designer, I'm shocked by how many sites have terrible design, and make information hard to find, especially government websites like the IRS. This is because design doesn't really matter here, people who are going to pay their taxes, are going to pay their taxes, and how quickly or frustration-free they are able to navigate the IRS website is irrelevant to the government - the government is going to get their money from law-abiding tax-payers anyways, so they simply don't care to make their website better.
You know what websites have great design? Scam websites. Scam websites work best on technology-illiterate/"gullible" people, either the extremely young, or extremely old. And by definition, technology illiterate people struggle to find the information/settings they want on their devices, so even if they fall for a scam, scammers find that these technology-illiterate groups will struggle to give scammers their information, the victims can't navigate the site and give the scammers their info.
So scammers solved this problem with great design. The "click here!" button is giant, green, wiggles aggressively to attract attention. They use all the psychological tricks of showing human faces and testimonials, even though they're made up. And the tricks and design works, and scammers get the info they want.
I am not so convinced in the idea of a museum, or rather I think it appeals to people who already find design appealing, and the people who are holding society back by disrespecting design, do not go anywhere near museums. In order for us to compete with corporations and politicians, we need to adopt their tactics. Yes, we need advertisements with Lebron James and swimsuit models to make design sexy
Interesting but a bit misunderstood perhaps upon reflection. Doors in high traffic generally need to open into the flow of traffic successively until people completely exit a building so that, for instance, a heavily occupied room where a fire starts, you don’t have to open the door inward against the pressure of a crowd fleeing, nor do you need to do so in hallways leading to egress.
Doors with a plate instead of a handle allow for little or no control over the door swing. Misunderstood? I’ve always assumed doors swing “out” since childhood in the US, and was generally never surprised by a handle. I was stymied when I lived in Europe. Doors swinging out = good design to me, door handles for control = good design to me. Signage, entirely different issue.
As for toilets in general there’s an entirely different double design magic at O’Hare airport. Men’s stall doors generally open inward, following the general rule that for low occupancy areas doors can open inward. If a fire starts in a stall [ insert joke about burning sensations or burning smells ] there’s no group of people crushing to get out. However, many people travel with roll bags. A door opening inward with rolling the roll bag inside with you is ridiculously clumsy compared to a stall door opening outward. The extra dumb magic at O’Hare compared to many airports is that for some reason the toilets themselves are quite shallow. At least in the notorious Dutch Shelf toilets in Holland and German the front well is deep. https://www.reddit.com/r/cursedcomments/comments/spwkjp/cursed_turd/ But due to bowl dangle dimensions of my own equipment I have found the shallow O’Hare model guarantees genital baptism. To paraphrase a naked preposition split-infinitive Star-Trek slogan:
“To [bowldly] go where no hung man has gone before.”
Ugh.
And let’s not forget the genius of Buckminster Fuller who determined many decades ago that road designers should bank the curves on freeway off-ramps. People for some reason were too foolish to slow down sufficiently and frequently flipped their cars on the off-ramps (imagine that, and in the pre seat belt days) and the results were often fatal. He suggested good design works where good judgement does not, and saved many lives.
Psychological engineering doesn't exist because most product design emerges from low empathy hierarchies. Because the people inside don't even know it exists, and if they did, it's not persistent with them. Any advice/patterns that are innovative die out -- there is no memetic persistence. Even if someone discovers a better way.
We just got off three years of authorities prescribing isolation for every problem faced by humans. It was cruel, and made lots of people suffer, and some irreversibly crazy. We still cannot talk about it -- instead we want to talk about Corsi-Rosenthal boxes. Doesn't that tell you something about the solution designers? Especially considering NONE of it worked? https://empathy.guru/2021/07/19/the-structural-memetics-of-masks/
Thanks for this article. My big design bugbear (thankfully now disappearing in NZ) is courtesy of those clever signwriters who printed signs backwards so they can be read in the mirror of the car ahead of you in traffic. Effectively that means thousands of drivers in the other lane coming towards you are all wondering what the heck a REBMULP is, while that single driver ahead can see that you are a plumber.
IDEO built an entire empire on the notion that all innovation should be prototyped and given to users before commercialization. And yet this rarely happens overall. It happens most routinely in food manufacturing, considered the least design oriented industry there is...which is not really true.
"In refugee camps the world over, many toilet and sanitary blocks are unlighted, unsafe, and not secure – especially for women and girls. Blocks of toilets are often affected by broken doors and locks, and placed in proximity to or within view of male facilities. With more than 1% of the world’s population now living in displacement, improvements to sanitation and safety in refugee camp settings will keep people safer and more secure.
In order to increase toilet usage, feelings of safety and security, and reduce incidents, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) are searching for new solutions with which to retrofit existing toilets around lighting, locking, and alerting. The IRC are looking to provide a tamper-proof lock, renewable-powered lighting, and data monitoring to toilet facilities in displacement camps." $30K challenge: https://irc.community.wazoku.com/challenge/a4f23bd110394a2b87f1cad0ddc2d869?utm_campaign=Female%20Toilets
So, do toilet doors not have a vacant/engaged indicator where you are? Usually pretty standard here. Only difficulty arises if the lock is busted and the place is busy enough for someone to risk it. Then a gentle nudge to the door will usually give you a good idea of whether it is occupied...
Doors in general though can go fuck themselves. As with a lot of design we interact with on a daily basis much can be done with standardisation. Traffic lights work brilliantly because everyone knows what the coloured lights mean, or can understand them based on their position in the stack. If every door in a public corridor had a handle if it was pull, or a metal plate thingy if it was push, that'd be good. If this was expanded so that with double doors, every door as you walk along the for e.g. left had side of the corridor was push, that'd be brilliant. Apply standardisation to phone chargers, password setting requirements, and self-checkout till design for e.g. and you're winning.
I once worked for an organisation that facilitated input from disabled people into the design of light rail transport systems etc., and it was enlightening to see how their perspectives were gathered, analysed, and then heavily compromised with competing demands in the design process. It didn't mean that the end result was terrible for those groups - the UK has a number of standardised approaches to accessibility that ensure on a general level that wheelchair users and those with sensory impairments stand a better chance of being able to use the thing safely, but there will always be a lot of people who face barriers to using all of it most of the time. And as someone under the height of 5'4" I still have to endure my arm being pulled out by it's socket if I need to use a hanging strap thing on the metro.
I do wonder how this kind of thing varies across the world, with for e.g. Japan springing to mind. Those toilets that wash your bum and flush automatically or the diagonal pedestrian crossing could only have been produced by a culture that values good public design surely?
ok what the heck I cannot stop trying to figure out wtf this Museum of Design is...like it feels like a film set for what a museum's website would look like but nothing on it is real lol
I did eventually find an award sign up screen https://competition.adesignaward.com/ and it seems like time is running out and I am pretty sure they charge you to apply?
I was trying to figure out if its a legit competition even and looked at the jury which is listed at the website https://awardjury.com/ !!! how the hell did they get that url
i feel like i understand nothing about this, less than i did when I started, and I must now commit my life to figuring it out
Ugh, this museum idea made me so excited! I think I said, "oh man that's such a good idea" quietly to myself, as I sat here, pooping in the privacy of my own home.
Have you ever visited the Corning Museum of Glass in New York? I think it has a similar effect to what you describe. We take glass massively for granted, but the history and technology we've developed over hundreds of years around it is mindblowing. It seems sortof banal, like how interesting could glass be? But it really changed the way I look at the world. Easily my favorite museum.
Interestingly, I just listened to a podcast episode about an area of design that does have measurable impacts: web design. I’ve been a student of web usability for some time. It’s an area where you can demonstrate results in metrics like CRO (conversion rate optimization), which translates into real dollars and cents. THAT gets people’s attention.
Single ply toilet paper should be illegal. It contravenes the Geneva Conventions. If I ran a building, owned company I would never never never stock the bathrooms with single ply toilet paper. What message does it send to your customers and employees by supplying them with single ply at one of their most intimate and vulnerable moments of the day? And moments after someone walking in on them pooping!