However, I am going to focus on design in this essay; I won't dwell on hygiene issues. Design requires forethought, so when you see a failure of design, it testifies to a failure of the thought process. It then begs the question, why do people fail to think?

I'm now going to take you through 5 common design problems with the aim of raising your consciousness, so to speak. Perhaps from now on, every time you visit a public rest room, you'll notice how common these problems are.

The rest room where I met the little boy was provisioned with a lower urinal such as in this picture (taken in a different rest room on another day). He had no problem finding a urinal suitable for his height.

But the same rest room was not provisioned with a lower wash-basin -- neither was this other rest room where I took the picture -- thus his problem reaching the press-tap. If you look around Singapore, you'd see that this is quite a common state of affairs. Many places are equipped with boys' urinals without being equipped with lower, smaller wash-basins.

Shouldn't this have been the most obvious consequential need? Did nobody think of it?

Perhaps architects and developers were all working on the assumption that boys would be accompanied by their fathers, who would help their sons wash their hands. While this may cover the majority of cases, it surely can't be hard to imagine that sometimes, it is mothers who take their sons out.

This is yet another example, it seems to me, of how Singaporeans have relatively uninquisitive thought processes. They plan for the typical situation or cater to the majority, and stop there. They don't interrogate their own models and assumptions, or give due regard to minority situations.

In most men's rest rooms, you'd see 3 or 4 stalls, 3 – 5 urinals, maybe 4 wash-basins and just one hand dryer. Yet we all know it takes at least as long to dry one's hands as to wash them, if not longer.

As a result, when the rest room is busy, most people will not get a chance to use the hand-dryer after washing their hands. Instead, they will resort to tissue paper, leaving the pulpy mess on the vanity counter, or worse, in the urinal, or they will flick their hands, thereby wetting the floor and making a bigger mess.

Why in all these years, no one has done a process flow analysis to determine the appropriate ratio of hand-dryers to wash basins is a mystery to me. Are we providing hand-dryers merely as a formality?

Especially in a warm tropical climate like ours, bacteria breed very rapidly, producing foul smells. Yet there are many rest rooms around Singapore with the barest minimum of ventilation. 

Some of the worst examples are found at metro stations, and surprisingly, it's the above-ground stations that tend to have worse-ventilated toilets than the underground ones. I invite you to ride the trains from station to station and look at the toilets at Paya Lebar, Aljunied, Somerset, Clementi and Bukit Batok. Some of these have no windows at all, but even if they do, they're seldom more than small louvred openings very high up. Unless there is strong wind from the outside, no air actually comes through them.

Generally, these toilets rely on just 1 or 2 exhaust fans that are woefully underpowered, failing to deliver the necessary air-change. The result is that they are always humid and smelly.

Is it so difficult to calculate correctly how much ventilation a space needs and how to provide for it? We seem to be designing them in a hit-or-miss manner.

At least this problem is being fixed. As more and more rest rooms are renovated, I see that entrance doors are being removed, replaced by privacy screens that block direct lines of sight.

For a long time, this was one of the chief banes here. After you've washed your hands clean (though unable to dry them) you still had to touch the door handle that hundreds of others have touched, in order to get out. Since very few have had a chance to dry their hands, the handles are almost always wet. Germs breed even more easily on perpetually wet surfaces.

Since I am male, I seldom have the need to use a seat toilet; even so, I have noticed a few places where the motion sensor that controls the flush is wrongly placed. Typically, it is too high up with the beam aimed at your head, instead of your back.

Hence, each time you bend your head down for whatever reason, or reach forward for the toilet paper, the flush is activated. This, even as you're still sitting there. The flush, of course, sends up a contaminated mist that you're absolutely sure coats your entire bottom, and even rises high enough for you to breathe in.

In the course of your 5 – 10 minutes sitting there, it flushes maybe 6 times, as you bob or turn your head, you cursing every time. At first, you think the flush is plain crazy, but after a while you realise that it's the movement of your head or shoulders that sets the thing off; having learnt that, you find yourself consciously sitting ramrod straight, allowing only your eyes to dart left and right, up and down. You're verily imprisoned by the sensor beam.

What happens when a boy uses the toilet, too short for his head to fully catch the beam, I have no idea.

Naturally you ask, does no one care to install these things correctly? Did they just happen to find a giant of a man to sit there and use him as a reference to judge the height for the sensor?

* * * * *

 
We equip our rest rooms with state-of-the-art automatic sensors and "intelligent" water-saving devices. But beyond buying the latest gadgetry, there appears to be an absence of intelligent forethought in designing them.

It seems to be part of a bigger problem throughout Singapore, where the hardware is impressive, but it never overcomes a habitual reliance on formulaic solutions and rigid mindsets. Where there are rules, we follow them punctiliously (but we never question the rules), but where there are no rules to follow and we have to think through the problem ourselves, the results aren't laudable at all. 

© Yawning Bread