I attended a wedding somewhere in Ilocos Sur, Philippines last July and in one of the stop overs, I saw the sign above. I remember Tony Fadell’s ted talk, the first secret of design is noticing. Taking a deeper look at how things are, not fault finding but being open for the possibility of change or improvement.
As you can see, someone might have thought that it’s clever to do the sign this way. Squeeze an arrow on the small side of the sign in order to cater to people coming from the left side of the area as shown in the diagram below.
The arrows indicate the movement of the passengers, coming out of the bus. Considering that going to the restroom is the most common, and sometimes urgent, action people do during stop overs, the sign really doesn’t do it’s purpose. For the people taking the green arrow route, yes it is, but for those taking the red arrow it might lead to a shit load of disaster.
Since taking notice is just step one of the action, the second step is to do a solution, in this case I can only propose because that place is hundreds of kilometers away from the city. So I propose two things:
- Change the sign and just keep the arrow on the wider side of the board.
- Move the sign sideways so the arrow will point directly to the restroom.
The people taking the green route will immediately see the restroom while those who are taking the red route will now notice the sign with the arrow pointing to the restroom.
Noticing even tiny details like this will help in exercising your brain to always question why things are made or behave in a certain way. By doing that you’ll develop a fresh approach in designing things. So be more mindful, keep noticing.
P.S. Somehow they got the sign to the women’s restroom right which is weird.
I’ll keep on posting stuff that I noticed, hopefully I find less but where’s the fun in that. :)
