Inclusive design rants #1 Toilets
Yes, toilets!
In my 5 years of Bachelors in Architecture, we designed many spaces. Artist’s residences, Art Galleries, Office buildings, Schools, Rural health centres, you name it. Private and public buildings.
With private residences, it’s easier to design because you’re designing for a family — a limited number of people who you can ‘interview’ and get to know their taste and personalities and translate this in your own way into a design. With public buildings, however, you’ve to design for just about everyone and have some estimates about footfall and occupancy, based on which you calculate how many toilets you need, how large your water tank needs to be and how much space everyone needs to freely roam around.
For example, in an art museum, you want people to have ample space to view the art and keep distance from one another and maybe in certain areas like an interactive exhibhit or the museum shop, you give a more cosy feel by making the space smaller than the rest of the areas. In a school, you want kids to focus when there’s a class going on but still leave room for imagination. So you have to create cosy focus areas but also enough open spaces and natural light. In architecture school, we mainly focused on the needs of the common denominator(s) and also on the numerical aspects — the physics of the structure (how to support it?), the anthropometry (human measurements — how high should a table be so that your back doesn’t hurt? How should the chair be in relation to the table? There are standards to follow) and the footfall (how many people? How many toilets? etc).
Accessibility was something we had to bake in because there are standards for that. For every x toilets, there should be 1 wheelchair-accessible toilet, there should be ramps etc, etc. So everyone thought that if you follow these guidelines, these standards set internationally, you’re making your building/space accessible for all.
So what did I do in every project? I’d follow the rules, put in the right number of accessible toilets both in men’s restrooms and women’s restrooms. This is how we all did it. At a shallow level this feels like, “Oh great! Inclusivity! A person with physical disabilities doesn’t have to go to a special toilet outside the men’s and women’s restrooms and feel excluded.” In retrospect, this is was an incredibly stupid way of thinking and I’ll tell you why.
My family and I usually travel together a lot and if my brother needs to go to the restroom, my dad would accompany him, check if the cubicle is clean, wait outside the door and make sure it doesn’t open, etc. My brother has special needs (Downs syndrome) and can do a lot of things on his own but he’s not completely socially-aware and hygiene-aware so he does need someone to look out for him and make sure no one takes advantage of him. So I thought it worked out usually because my dad is there to help him. Once, my mom and I had to travel with my brother on our own and he was quite older, around 17. We were in an airport that didn’t have a common disabled toilet. So if my mom had to take him inside, she had to take him into the womens’ restroom.
Then it hit me. We really needed a ‘common’ toilet for them both to access together. And if we needed it in our situation, there must be so many others who needed the same and were forced to choose between men’s or women’s.
In UX we have accesibility guidelines too, and in product design as well. Following these guidelines doesn’t give you the right to say you’ve created an inclusive design or a universal design. You have to think about the needs of differently-abled people and question your design over and over again, and ideally test it with people with varying abilities and genders.
Being inclusive can serve many purposes in this scenario: A separate accessible/inclusive restroom can help elderly people, people who need help in the restroom (this could even be a need if you’re temporarily injured and you have a person of the opposite gender traveling with you), people who are physically challenged and shouldn’t be maneuvering through a line in the main restrooms, people with babies... and many many more.
Imagine, because of that one architect, we had so much trouble using a restroom! A basic human need! Do you want to be a person who makes people feel that way? If not, here are my learnings, I want to share with you:
#1
Unless you experience something, it’s hard to think about it in advance. But if you start noticing people, understanding their problems and making it a point to get to know what would make their lives better, you’ll automatically think in an inclusive manner.
#2
Don’t take for granted how much power you have as a designer. You can choose to include or you can choose to exclude. Be wise here.
#3
Equality and inclusivity are two different things. It’s important to keep both in mind, but don’t mix them up under false assumptions.
That was my rant about toilets! There’s a lot more to come. Stay tuned and thanks for reading :) If you have interesting insights on inclusive design, I’d love to hear them in the responses/comments section!
