9
votes
Architects behind Lapee say pink spiral design could end gender toilet inequality
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- The penny drops: at last a female urinal for the festival crowd
- Authors
- Richard Orange
- Published
- Jul 4 2019
- Word count
- 688 words
Does it have to be pink? I see that this was designed by women, for women, with women's needs in mind. And that's good. However, by making the toilet hot pink, they're invoking a connection to those condescending "... for women" products - just like Ellen says about Bic's 'For Her' pens: "They come in both lady colors, pink and purple. And they're just like regular pens except they're pink, so they cost twice as much."
In other news... Every problem facing humanity's survival has been solved.
Now... what about them toilets aye?
(I weep for the future)
Sanitation is actually quite a basic bit of infrastructure to get right, in the same category as heating and roofs over our heads, and its development has caused a large improvement in conditions for people that have it. It's still quite a problem in less developed areas, and (I presume) in places like refugee camps.
Now, sanitation at festivals is hardly a millenium goal, but making it less unfair (which it is, massively) is a lot more worthy of design attention than, say, ad tech or supercars or whatnot ;).
I really dislike this attitude. We're supposed to only try to solve the very worst problems in life, and presumably we have to do them in order of how bad they are. Somehow someone just making life a tiny bit nicer for a few million people is a bad person now..
It's not like they've developed a new kind of bomb, or an exciting new way to burn fossil carbon.
How good a design this is isn't really what I was getting at. It's the idea that we should only solve Big Serious Problems that I dislike. I mean I guess there is a chance that the people who worked on this might have solved fusion power instead of making a slightly better pisser, but it's probably fairly safe to say they wouldn't.
But OK, maybe it's not an ideal solution. Maybe some people will crap in them. It happens. Festival toilets usually get hosed down fairly regularly and even if 1 in 5 are shitted up that's still 80% which aren't - that alone is a significant improvement over the biological disaster areas that are most festy bogs a day or so in. The open-topness is good, it stops heat and smell building up - and if I have to choose between someone maybe seeing my head and shoulders (gasp!) while I piss vs entering a box full of raw sewage which can easily be 45C+ in the sun, that's not even a choice. Plus, it's not really very hard to arrange toilet areas in such a way to encourage a bit more privacy.
Oh, there really is. You haven't been to a big festival during a hot summer, have you? We're talking about 100k+ people in a field with several truckloads of booze and fast food for 3-4 days. Anything which offers an alternative to those awful plastic tardises is better, be it for men or women. Men tend to get "long drop" style urinals, which are pretty good, but until now women have nothing. They're not comparing this to port-a-potties, they're comparing it to urinals. They're saying nobody ever bothered designing a urinal for women, which might not be entirely true, but I've certainly never seen one.
Anyway, it doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be slightly better, and it seems to be that.
Anecdotally I can say that when I shared this story on Facebook I got near universally positive reactions from my female friends, many of whom are festival veterans. Not everyone is puritanical about bodily functions, sometimes people just want a piss. Especially at a festival. Pink I can take or leave, who even cares. It's just a colour.
Have you ever pissed behind a tree or a bush?
I've often used trough urinals - and, from observation, so do lots of other men. I've often had other men around me, using the same trough urinal as me.
And I'm not European. I'm Australian.
Just because you wouldn't use a product like this, that doesn't mean that noone will use it. A women's urinal will get used, just like men's urinals do.
Male urinals have been a feature at all the festivals I've ever been to. They're a good way to increase throughput, reduce the load on the tardises while also reducing the amount of overspray in mixed toilets. Which is a good thing for everyone involved, I'd say.
I think with the ventilation the key thing is moving air. The smell might (will) be terrible but you might at least have a bit of a breeze bringing you fresher air. Portapotties have vents but they never seem to work very well.
fwiw, I live in a place where these are a thing. That's a portable setup but there are permanent installs on several streets in my city. The streets which get rowdy late at night, not the main shopping streets, but still. Beats having dudes pissing all over the place.
There used to be a bar near my house which had a large, wide, chest-high window between the gents and ladies toilets, placed above the urinals (over the sinks in the ladies, and both facilities had stalls too), so everyone could see everyone else, which was pretty funny.