When The Toilet Works Against You

Important Terms:

Accessibility

Affordance

Color

Form follows function

Ockham’s Razor

Operability

Simplicity 

Bathrooms are necessary for everyone. In hospitals, each room has its own bathroom. Hospital bathrooms are designed to be as safe and as accessible as possible. The traditional hospital bathroom is relatively small, has a toilet that is not too low to the floor, a sink, and a few extra safety features in case the patient is in an emergency situation.

The emergency pull cord in hospital bathrooms is colored red to draw attention to the bathroom patron as a way of saying “if you need help, pull this to notify a nurse.” The affordance is clearly evident for the pull cord, especially when small children use hospital bathrooms and pull the cord in a non-emergency situation. It is clearly evident that you are supposed to pull the cord in a downward fashion in order to notify help if you have fallen or experienced another emergency.

The toilets are designed to use the form follows function paradigm. This paradigm is similar to Ockham’s Razor in that the simplest design is chosen for use. The toilet contains minimal features such as a toilet seat, a flush handle, and maybe a mechanism to clean any “messes.” There are no toilet seat covers.

 Recently, a design

 change has been

 offered for hospital

 bathrooms because

 the bathrooms are

 very small  and

 sometimes connect to

 adjoining rooms. The

 addition of another

 door threatens the  

 accessibility,  operability, and

 simplicity of the

 bathroom. A door on 

 either side of the

 bathroom creates a

 more difficult  environment for patients and individuals with disabilities to

 access the bathroom and can hinder ADA  compliance. The new design offers to

 capitalize on the smallness of the bathroom and combine the toilet  and sink

 into a combination item. The toilet-sink combination offers to put the toilet either on a track  system or a pocket system. The track system hosts the toilet underneath the sink and is available by opening  the cabinet door underneath the sink. When the toilet emerges, the flush button activates. However, the  concern of the flush button is that when the person sits on the toilet, the probability of accidentally  engaging the flush button increases. The button should be changed to a bar-style flush mechanism and  attached to the back of the toilet to remedy this issue. The pocket style toilet-sink combination offers to  decrease accessibility to individuals in wheelchairs because the individual will have to pull the sink apart to  access the toilet.

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