3 Unique Designs for Public Bathroom

Most of us have a experience in public restroom, and whatever you want, you might be surprised or annoyed by the design of restroom. We’ve seen women and girls complain about the long queue of toilet, taking too much time for waiting even make girls go to toilet together a common sense. Flushing problems in toilet is also a big problem we could never miss.

Have you get a experience when you use a public toilet while someone leave with his marks in toilet? And some people gets a really bat habit using urinals, restroom owners have to buy urinal mats for preventing the floor from getting wet and smelly. Most of us may know these issues but never considered of how to deal with it and blame their manners and habits. But all those problems may be solved by unique designs, here are 3 unique designs for help to solve problems we met.

1. Smart Toilet

Public smart toilet is an innovative invention for those people who are, European and Japanese are precursor of using this advanced and the rest of the world still get a long way to catch them. Many people still in doubt with water saving and hygiene of smart toilet. On the contrary, saving water with a proper amount of water and keep toilet clean is exactly what a smart toilet good at. There are many types of smart toilets you can find on market, most of them get various and different features, but they are common on some basic functions as you can see below.

Auto-flushing

Let’s get to the first problem, the water saving problem. For normal public toilet, flushing toilet might be hard to control, some people prefer to flush once before they use it, some people just forget it. Neither of using too much water nor leave the wastes in toilet are good habit. Smart toilet would be a nice solution, it has sensors to detect if you are moving your body away and leaving, just like a urinal with sensors. And since then, you shall never worry about the germs when you don’t have to touch the handle to flushing.

And how does a smart toilet saving water?

Most of the smart toilet gets a flushing adjustment features, you can change the amount of flush each time until you get a satisfied level. Besides, some smart toilet may record the water flushed every time and choose a proper level. According to the data provided by cnet, a basic toilet will use 1 gallons per flush more than a smart one. In some country, install a water-efficient toilet needs to be certificated.

Clog-protection

Once the smart toilet is clogged, it will stops you from flushing until you fix the problem.

By consideration of the multiple problems, such as budget, the difficulty of maintain, the installation and durability, popularize smart toilet may take many years in public places, but this design is still worth a try for your home.

2.Fly in Urinal

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in Netherlands is famous, not for the scale or services, but for its special design on urinals. You would find fly in urinals in their public bathroom! Certainly, it’s not a real fly, just a simple trick for reducing the costs of cleaning. One will realize it is a paint at the first time and smile for thinking it real. But there’s always a fly in the same position near the drain. What does the fly painting used for?

Gents may already known.

It’s because men when urinating, are always cannot hold themselves to pee on things, especially the one looks like to be away in a moment. That’s a little psychology applies on real life. When people are busy in buying urinal mats, the owner of Schiphol Airport had already came up with a smarter solution to make public restroom clean.

There are many tricks took in urinals, flies in Schiphol Airport is just a example. There are many interesting designs to make men pee on “target” and take one more step closer to urinals. Golf flags, soccer gates and even trees can be a choice, men just need something to pee on when they are urinating.

This design is take even no costs and repays a lot, just one new idea could save much labour and costs for urinal cleaning.

3.Gentolet

We often heard that there should be more space and toilet cubicle units for women public bathroom. Generally, women take two to three times longer than men to use a toilet, but the size are usually the same. What’s more, toilet cubicles in man’s room are usually empty, making the usage of space a great waste.

In 2015, Gentolet was awarded the Red Dot as it is designed for dealing with the problem that there always a long queue near female public bathroom. It makes the toilet designed to serve both sides.

How it works

The Gentolet is driven by electric.

First, it would mainly serve males, that means only if there is no man uses the cubicle, the door to female side is accessible. when one side of the toilet open, the other side will be locked until user inside goes out. How to judge a cubicle if it is no one use or about to be use? By detecting the doors. If the door is unlocked and unopened, that means there’s no one using it, then the door of female side can be opened, and once it opened, the male side will be locked automatic.

The design tries to solve the problem disturbing people for a long time. But it still get some problems.

What’s the problem

*The door’s opening logic.

Let’s come back to the doors. When a door is unlocked and unopened, does it really means that there’s no one in it? What if someone forget to lock the doors, then it can be opened to both sides. Try to image a picture, a man is using such a toilet and suddenly, doors of female sides opened and there comes a women...

*Gaps Cleaning and maintaining

We had talked about why do public bathroom stall doors have gaps on both sides in a past essay. In Gentolet design, a toilet cubicle must be in full height floor to ceiling style to protect privacy. That comes a problem of hygiene and it would take more cost to clean and maintain. In a high traffic public places, such a situation is obviously unacceptable.

*More space required

The special designed Gentolet we can see from 3D drawings indicated that it requiles more spaces than normal toilet. The standard width of a normal toilet requires 1000mm and the depth is 1200mm. The toilet in drawings tell us the width of a toilet cubicle unit takes almost up to 1700mm. The would takes 40% more space than a normal one. So here comes the problem, does it worth? Every 2 Gentole takes up space near 3 normal toilet could use.

There are more problems needs to be improved for Gentolet, but the idea of improving the normal toilet we use now is still innovative. It tried to solve a problem that everyone may have noticed but no one started to deal with. That is the so called “design”, isn’t it?

The 3 unique design we introduced are including urinals, toilets and design of toilet partitions. Some of the designs may not so easy to be realized, but it gives us a new vision to us to face the world. Design can be everywhere in our life, even for toilet, we design to solve problems.

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