The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom

Re:The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom by ssharp on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @11:04AM (#11246056)

The University I used to work for had started the practice of building several small one-person bathrooms next to one another, so the would be a block of three or four bathrooms by each other. I found this to a nice setup but I'm sure this would cost far more than a men's bathroom with toilet stall, urinal and sink and a women's bathroom with two stalls and a sink.

I used to go to night classes after working all day and would often times want to change from my business casual attire to something more comfortable. Having those types of bathrooms certainly made changing easier and more private.

I'm sure the University had various reasons for doing this, but I think the spark had come to help alleviate anxiety regarding bathroom use by non-cis persons.

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Re:The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom by CWuestefeld on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @11:35AM (#11246308)

At a resort I've been to a few times, the nightclub area had a cool design. It was a largish round room with sink in the middle. The perimeter was individual tiny rooms with just a toilet. These were all gender-neutral, I guess that's OK because they were actual rooms, having walls and doors.

It seems like that gender neutrality would allow for extra efficiency, so that the dense-pack around the perimeter of a single restroom can handle more potential guests.

I never asked about how it affects cleaning effort, though.

In any case, the original article points out specific OSHA regulations. So it doesn't really matter if there are alternate designs that could work better; you're still stuck in the traditional paradigm, as regulation always acts as a drag on innovation.

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