Rant about bad toilet/rest room design

Design should be about making things better, easier to use and understand, make better use of materials and resources etc but one area that the concept of design has rarely visited is the world of the public toilet/rest room.

I once had reason to go to the UBS investment bank in Bishopsgate, London. The toilet facilities were as you would expect, clean, well maintained and well laid out and it was obvious this reflected the wealth of that particular organization,  this I find however, is a rarity. Recently I used the facilities for the staff in one of the many stores of a major UK supermarket giant, and it was dismal, don't get me wrong , it was clean but the layout was just not a consideration. To use the urinal one has to put your coat, bag etc on the sink units as there is no way are they going on the floor, but the taps and soap dispensers are all automatic, they work well enough but they can't tell the difference between a hand and a coat, yes you can see it coming, I ended up with a coat  sleeve full of soap and the strap of my bag soaking wet. The problem here is not the technology it is in the fact that who ever designed (and I use the word very loosely) the facilities did not think for a moment as to how they are used by others!

Here I see another and rather wider problem, familiarity. Of course the designer of the facilities has a need to use them but this can create a complacency, 'why think about what is needed, why make it hard work, I use them every day' and of course they do, but they are probably office based which is a very different environment from the one I visited on that soap filled sleeve day. They had not considered where people put things, coats, bags, paperwork, PDA's, safety equipment (hard hats, gloves etc).

Is this a trivial moan, well I think not. The toilet facilities are vital to the good running of a building and organization. A food outlet should have impeccable hygiene standards, they reflect on how well the organisation cares about such things which in turn will influence the customer experience. I can not empirically prove that good clean well designed facilities = good clean general hygiene in the shop but my gut feeling (no food poisoning pun intended) is that it does.

It's all to easy to overlook what seems like unimportant detail and seemingly concentrate on trivia but it is odd, if not perverse, that more thought is often given to the front facade of a building than one of the important areas within.