What Does the Design of Masks and Hand Soap Mean for Social Distancing?
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, social distancing has become one of the main strategies that public health experts recommend in order to contain the disease.
However, at the beginning of the outbreak, it was very concerning that spring breakers ignored the public health advice and congregated on the Florida beach. While the confirmed cases in the US continue to surge, it’s still constantly reported that people failed to comply with the social distancing guidelines and gathered in the parks, even in the epicenter of the outbreak, New York City.
This made me think about why people fail to follow the guideline to stay 6-feet apart. Are there any public health guidelines that socially influence people’s behaviors? How can design help with the current situation?
Why People Ignored Social Distancing?
It’s obvious that one reason why people didn’t take it seriously was the misinformation about the virus. Lots of people believed it’s just simple flu and won’t affect young people.
But there is something else very interesting. When the college students flooded the beaches in Florida mid-March, CNN interviewed several people on the beach, asking them if they were worried about the current pandemic. There was one response that really stood out to me. Someone said,
“We’re not very worried about it cause we’re on the sand. And it’s an open area. It’s not a lot of doorknobs, not a lot of things that you can touch.”
Apparently, it is actually dangerous to think in this way since COVID-19 is a respiratory disease. It’s not just about whether there are dirty doorknobs for people to touch. Close contacts with people will also constitute risks.
But why would people think in this way? This traced back to one of the early emphasizes of the CDC guidelines: washing your hands. Very likely, the person I mentioned above focused too much on keeping his hands clean but was not aware that the coronavirus can easily be transmitted through droplets.
Meanwhile, while they put lots of effort into educating the public about washing hands, the CDC did not recommend healthy individuals wear face masks only until April 3rd. But masks are a simple way to make sure people know COVID-19 is a respiratory disease.
Did CDC’s advice affect how people respond to the situation? To answer this question, let’s talk about what hand soap and masks mean to the general public. How do these two products differ in nature, which contributes to people’s different perceptions of what is happening?
First of all, this is not a discussion about the efficacy of masks and washing hands. I’m not a public health expert. I can’t speak about this. But what I will try to do is to provide opinions on how the design of these products can socially influence people.
Hand Soap VS Masks
Hand soap is a product that we use pretty often even if we’re not in a pandemic setting. Washing hands have become a common hygiene routine that most of the modern families follow every day. So by nature, the hand soap is designed for a daily usage scenario. It’s designed to make you ease and relax at home.
Even if for products like alcohol-based sanitizers, though they are widely used in hospitals, the manufacturers added in pleasant fragrant and bottled them in lovely colors to market them into people’s daily household settings.
So, when an unprecedented pandemic like this hit the world, people wouldn’t realize the magnitude of this crisis by just washing their hands. It’s easy to think it’s just a new type of flu since the guidelines for coronavirus from the health officials are pretty similar to those for influenza.
But what about masks? Masks are never designed for daily settings. People only wear them when it’s related to illness. Especially in western culture, it is an abnormal thing to wear a mask in public. It’s truly intimidating to see a person who has half of their faces covered. And it made us suspicious if the person with a mask is ill or potentially contagious.
Unlike hand soap which gives people comfort, the masks naturally give people fear and raise their alert. If I start to see some people wearing masks around me in the public space, I definitely won’t live my life as nothing has happened. Even if I’m someone who never reads the news and doesn’t know anything about coronavirus, when I see lots of people are wearing masks, probably it’s time for me to google what’s going wrong.
With the masks keeping people vigilant, they also create a physical barrier for social interaction which can send a signal for people to stay away. The strange masks with the long bird beaks used in the bubonic plague in the 17th century are believed as a design to keep the distance between doctors and sick patients. This mask was invented before the discovery of the germ theory. Scientifically, it couldn’t effectively protect the doctors from contracting the disease. But symbolically, it serves as a visible signal to tell people to stay away and be careful.
On the contrary, washing hands is a practice everybody does at home. I know I wash hands every day but I can never know if someone else does this as well. Again, I wouldn’t be able to know the scale and impact of the pandemic by only knowing I’m washing hands. And it wouldn’t form a group pressure to push me to obey the public health guidelines as well.
This explains why people couldn’t take the coronavirus seriously at the early stage.
Drawbacks of Wearing Masks
People and experts in Asia widely believed the quick adoption of universal masking policy did help slow down the spread of the disease. It’s true that wearing masks can alert the general public at the early stage of the disease and prompt people to proactively prevent the disease. But apart from mask-wearing policy, Asian countries like China also enforced strict policies to effectively maintain social distancing. So it’s still too soon to draw the conclusion that the masks are the key to flatten the curve.
Especially, when everybody starts to wear masks, it becomes a new norm. Can it still alert people to stay away from each other? Some experts worry the masks will give people a false sense of security then forget social distancing.
More seriously, the cultural implications of wearing masks do not make it easy for everyone to safely wear them. Since the outbreak in China, there has been an increasing number of hate crimes towards Asian Americans. Some Asian people might hesitate to wear a mask since they’re afraid wearing mask will easily make them stand out and become a bait for assaults.
People of Asian descent are not the only ones who are marginalized by the masks. After CDC’s guidelines on mask-wearing, two African Americans with masks were kicked out of a store in Illinois. Some African Americans thought it’s a dilemma for them to choose whether to wear a mask.
Unfortunately, the masks enlarge the existing racial biases and make it a tough choice for people of color to decide whether to wear a mask.
Small Design Changes Can Help with Social Distancing
Maybe the ignorance of mask-wearing at the early stage of the outbreak contributes to the lack of vigilance among the public. But as the pandemic continues to plague the world, there’s no reason to believe people are still not aware of the danger around them.
So, let’s go back to the issue at the beginning of this article. Why are parks still packed with crowds?
People are staying at home. But it’s nearly impossible for people to completely stay away from their life necessities, like grocery shopping, coffee, and of course the parks. There’s no doubt outdoor exercises can help people to maintain their well-being. After a week of cabin fever in the house, people feel the need to exercise outside.
Instead of thinking about why parks are packed, it might be a better idea to think about how parks fail to let people keep the distance.
Stores are packed with people, too. But they’re trying to use small design changes to direct people to stay apart. Stores including Walmart, Kroger, and Target put floor markings at the entrance or checkout to show people what it means to stand 6-feet apart. It’s also reported some stores started to tape signage on their floors to institute a one-way movement in their aisle to avoid unnecessary encounters.
People in Thailand brought the creativity of social distancing to the next level. A cafe used a cart pulled by a rope to keep the distance. An elevator was taped with markings to mitigate the risk within a sealed area.
Studies on disaster preparedness have found that people will change their behavior if there are three conditions in place: they know what to do, why to do it and they see other people like themselves also doing it.
People mostly know why they need to practice social distancing. But the narrow aisles might make them too overwhelmed to know what to do. It’s also very hard for them to actually realize others are doing it as well. However, with the help of these visible markings, all of the problems are solved.
Finally, if we look at the parks again, is there any way that we can implement similar design improvements in the park to remind people of social distancing? Using markings to keep groups apart in the park? Designing directions to make people move in one-way? Well, I see lots of opportunities here.
