ABOUT
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OUTLINE
THE WORKSHOP
PARTICIPANTS
SCHEDULE
OBSERVATIONS
DISCUSSION
DESIGNS
We asked for toilet stories as submissions to the workshop. Here is what our participants wrote:
Jo-Anne Bichard
Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, Royal College of Art / Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, UCL
When I was about 8 years old... MORE
Judy Chen
Donald Bren School of Informatics, University of California, Irvine
Multi-Purpose Paper MORE
Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood
Dept. of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science
A Communal Piazza MORE
Kathya Ethington
Photographer
When I was a Kid MORE
Fabien Girardin
Interactive Technologies Group, Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona
Bathroom Misbehvaiours MORE
Yasmina Haryono & Giovanni Inella
Freelance interaction designer & Graduate student at Design Academy Eindhoven
Last Night a Toilet Saved My Life MORE
Marije Kanis
DISC, Brunel University
Organising situated choice and sedimented practices.. PDF
Bart Knijnenburg
Innovation Scientist
Sharing the Inconvenience MORE
Nicolas Nova
Media and Design Lab, EPFL, Lausanne
Empty But Locked From The Inside MORE
Tijmen Schep
New Media and Digital Culture, Utrecht University
Voicemail VerhavenMORE
Els De Vos & Baharak Bashar
Do Not Silence My Bladder MORE
We also wrote toilet stories of our own to inspire them:
Arianna Bassoli
London School of Economics and Political Science
Empty But Locked From The Inside MORE
Johanna Brewer
University of California, Irvine
Empty But Locked From The Inside MORE
Karen Martin
University College London
Empty But Locked From The Inside MORE
Jo-Anne Bichard: Untitled
When I was about 8 years old I use to walk to school past a church that had a length of metal bar that was used as a fence. A lot of the children use to flip over the metal bar, holding on and doing little summersaults over it. One morning on the usual journey to school I misjudged my 'flip' and landed awkwardly, grazing my thigh. At school, a boy asked me what had happened and I showed him my thigh, he then slapped it where I had been grazed. I was quite angry about this so I chased him and he ran into the boys toilet and I didn't think twice as I ran in there after him. However, I was seen going into the boys toilets by the schools headmistress, who not only also followed me in, but then dragged me out and spanked me in front of everyone for going in there. Over three decades later this space is still a socially unacceptable space for me - which makes doing research of this space so fascinating. Although more recently, whilst conducting research in men's toilets, whilst being chaperoned by officials, I was rather bemused to see that my presence in an 'official' capacity did not inhibit men from urinating in front of me.
Judy Chen: Multi-Purpose Paper
During my sophomore year of college, my floormates and I heard about a massive celebration in the Castro district in San Francisco. Reminiscent of New Orleans' Mardi Gras, hordes of people gather on Castro Street every year to celebrate Halloween with loud music, eccentric costumes, and public drunkenness. Advertised as the craziest block party in the Bay Area, we decided we had to see this event for ourselves.
We were told that most people showed up in costumes, and since we didn't decide to attend until the day of the event, we all had to scramble around for makeshift costumes. I opted for dressing as a mummy. This required an hour-long painstaking process of having my roommate wrap me up in multiple toilet paper rolls.
Later, as everyone was getting ready to leave for the party, one of the toilets in the bathroom in our dorm building became clogged and started to overflow. We had run out of paper towels the day before and had yet to receive more. Our supply of toilet paper was also running low, thanks to my costume. Needing something to prevent the flow of water from seeping towards the carpet in the hallway, we ripped my costume apart and began using the toilet paper to clean the mess up.
Ironically, I ended up going to Castro that night dressed as a plumber.
Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood: A Communal Piazza
There is bar in Earl's Court called The Troubador, a great place to meet and enjoy Jazz nights. However what is striking about this place is the toilets, which deserve an honorary mention. First off, they're semi-unisex: chaps to the left, ladies to the right, with a bizarre font-like communal basin in the middle, with many taps with lion heads. But the hand dryers, oh! the hand dryers! You know the type that you have to wave your hands under for five minutes just to get one paltry cough of air? Well, this isn't the sort you'll find at the Troubadour. No, these hand dryers are so powerful your hands dry in seconds and your clothes and hair billow out dramatically behind you. As any waiter or staff at the place, and their reply will be: "Is that a tsunami? No, it's just the world's strongest hand dryer."
The communal font makes the place a meeting place; people hang around the toilets for longer that needed to chat and talk to each other, take pictures and just exchange mobile phone numbers. There are people that go to Troubador and listen to the music from the next door auditorium in the toilets (the acoustics are better when the driers are not on).
The feeling of the toilet is great, you can imagine an underground open space for interaction and social exchange, based on something that in other places is considered embarrassing or shameful, people comes to terms with the openness of the space an integrate well. I wish there were many places to go the loo which were like this.
Kathya Ethington: When I Was a Kid
There was just something that I didn't trust about being in a public toilet, when I was a kid, especially the mirrors and what could be behind them. Perhaps I had an over- active imagination because I figured that there had to be cameras and/or people sitting behind those mirrors watching us. You know, like the two-way mirrors that one sees in movies where the cop interrogates the bad guy.
What happened each time I entered a public toilet was I quickly stole a glance at the mirrors, just to make sure where they were positioned in relation to the stalls. More likely than not, I was disappointed because they usually face the stalls. When I finished and went to wash my hands, I was cautious of looking up and into the mirror. I didn't want anyone taking weird photos of me washing my hands. I was usually fascinated with how women preened and groomed, completely unaware that their privacy was being rudely compromised. I shook my head in disapproval and quickly rushed out.
As an adult, I always have a twinge of suspicion in my stomach each time I enter a public bathroom. It is perhaps a strange thing for a lot of people, but itís something of my childhood that I canít shake and even find some sort of comfort in. From time to time, I am still reluctant to look in the mirror. Ever since I became a photographer, though, there are moments when I lift up my camera and take a self-portrait in the mirror. I would like to say "A-HA! You're captured as well!" To those imaginary peeping Toms that live behind those bathroom mirrors.
Fabien Girardin: Bathroom Misbehvaiours
For 2 years, I frequented a bathroom at a former workplace. It was in a higher-education institution hosting an ensemble of skilled, well-conducted people. Surprisingly to me, their manners were barely translated in the context of the 4th place (i.e. public bathroom). In my daily "in-betweeness" routine, I was often stunned by the number of toilet sheets left on the floor around the stools and urinals and in the proximate surroundings of the trash. That made me wonder about the influencing factors that triggered these misbehaviors. Several reasons come to my mind. First, the anonymity of the space affords carelessness. Second, it is a public environment; therefore it is expected that somebody who is paid for it will erase any negligence. Third, the awkwardness of the situation generates imprecise actions such as throwing things while in the rush, or manipulating tissues with a few fingers. Finally, picking up a paper that was dropped could provoke disease-causing agents to be acquired from the dirty surface. Nevertheless, should these bathroom misbehaviors be considered as lack of respect of the place and its surrounding environment? Should design or authorities prevent them? Does it bother the frequent user in its "in-betweeness" routine? On could argue that some slight recent traces of (mis)activities might carry the sense of relaxed atmosphere and lively place.
Yasmina Haryono & Giovanni Inella:
Last Night a Toilet Saved My Life
Last night a toilet saved my life: toilets as sanctuaries or safe havens. This is an assumption based on personal experiences and observations, where people seek shelter, safety and/or temporary relief within the transitory space that is the public toilet.
There's a couple of stories here, both set in London during Yasmina's undergraduate days. In some ways, it reflects the use of toilets as privacy facades and touches upon the British culture of alcohol-drinking..
The first is the personal experience of napping at a public toilet: whilst in central London I suddenly became unwell and in a state of high physical and mental distress, I sought refuge at the Charing Cross subterranean toilets.
My initial reaction was to catch the earliest train home and get myself to bed. Unfortunately, at the time, I lived in college dormitories that were only linked to central London by the British Railway service and there were only trains every half hour.
I really just needed a private space where I could wait for the painkillers to kick in; preferably also a place where I could vomit privately in case things really went wrong.
The Charing Cross station public toilets was a paid facility located beneath the station. It was large, well-lit, with spacious stalls and usually very clean, with a couple of cleaning ladies always milling about.
I went in, found an empty stall, placed my overcoat on the floor and curled into a ball, willing the physical discomfort to go away and for the painkillers to kick in. I fell asleep after some minutes, and woke up, maybe half an hour later, the pain gone and I felt much better.
After washing my hands and face, and generally much refreshed, I went to catch my train back to the dormitories.
The second experience is about how the toilets at college, for me at least, became synonymous with: "I am not well, please check on me if I don't come out in 5 minutes."
This is largely due to my role as Vice-President of the college's Student Union. Whilst this may sound glamourous on CVs, in reality it involved staying sober, holding weekly Thirsday Thursday parties, cleaning up after everybody afterwards and occasionally calling the emergency services after particularly rowdy events.
I'd seen many students wobble into the toilets and emerge in better and sorrier states than when they went in. I had this small table where I sat dispensing SU Bar tickets, near the toilet entrances so in the back of my mind I somehow kept up an overview of the toilet traffic and I knew to go in and check if someone was in there for an abnormally long time.
I've found students with their heads in the toilet bowl, holding onto it as if for dear life, or, looking positively green yet waving me away, saying, "I'll just be a minute... I'm fine really..." and there were some occasions when students have locked themselves inside the stalls and were too sick to unlock the door.
There seems to be a ritual of going to the loo, getting sick, and then going back to the party. Granted this was an extreme case, but more often than not, there were small rituals such as having a "vomit buddy", which is someone who would hold your hair whilst you were vomiting so it didn't fall into the mess.
Bart Knijnenburg: Sharing the Inconvenience
My story is not about a public toilet, but about the lack of one. The Dutch have to deal a lot with what we call "wildplassen" (which deliciously directly translates to "wild peeing"), and since we don't have convenient public toielts like the British, we put fines on letting your waters flow in public.
My story starts with a college field trip to Utrecht. It was the end of a long day when I finally found the courage to express my love to a very special girl. On the train back to Eindhoven, we fell for each other. As the emotional tension built up inside me, when we got to Eindhoven train station, she asked me if I wanted to stay the night with her.
Instead of answering yes, I said "Okay, but I really got to pee now, I can't hold it!"
Her reply was "Just go in that tunnel there." She discretely turned away when I let go against the wall of the tunnel behind the Eindhoven train station.
I was very afraid of what she might think about this bizarre situation, but when I finished she just smiled, said, "That's better, right?", took my hand, and walked home. At that moment I knew she was very special.
We stayed together for about three and a half year, and we're still good friends.
Nicolas Nova: Empty But Locked From The Inside
When I was in primary school, my kid friends and I used to be engaged in physical activities. Breaks during long school morning and afternoon were indeed about running around, climbing to walls and ropes, etc. And this physical frenzy also invaded the toilet area. A curious (and quite pointless) trick we discovered was that it was possible to go into the toilet, climb the wall and get out of that place because there were a gap between the ceiling and the wall so that people could sneak in there and escape. Thus, the door was locked and nobody was inside. Of course, the process of climbing led to embarrassing situations such as kids slipping while climbing and falling in the toilet, or dropping glasses, sandwich or books in the process.
But what is interesting to me, now years later, in that story is both:
- The way we treated the toilet architecture as a playful space. As it seemed there was a roofed area and school people thought that it would be a good place to put toilets. And kids had a different reading of space, finding the area to have an interesting affordance to climb walls and stuff like that.
- How this trick has been interestingly used by some to use the I-have-to-go-to-the-toilet-sir excuse to escape boring lecture, lock the toilet, escape from them and play games elsewhere.
Tijmen Schep: Voicemail Verhalen
In September 2006 the NetNiet.org foundation, of which I am a founding member, launched the first edition of the NetNiet.org Wireless Festival. For two weeks the historic center of university town Utrecht was bathed in wireless signals which could be uncovered by anyone bringing a device that had WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS or GSM capabilities. One of the installations was "voicemail stories":
At 10 locations in the center of town you can find phonenumbers. Call these numbers and you will hear a poem, a song, an anecdote or something else. After the beep you can leave your own poem, song or whatever you like. Every night we check all the voicemail and place set the best one as a message for people to hear the next day, and then the cycle continues.
The idea was that voicemail plus a little manpower could create a cheap, accessible form of locative media.
The picture shows one of these phonenumbers behind the window in the background at one of Utrecht's pub(lic?) squares. We wondered what discussions would arise around this notorious place of boozery and bladder-relief for Utrecht's drunk students. (This number was originally supposed to be pasted to the inside of the toilet, but we decided not to for number of pratical and ideological reasons.)
Els De Vos & Baharak Bashar: Do Not Silence My Bladder
Considerable efforts had been made by the City of Ghent to provide public lavatories and hygiene facilities in public spaces. No less than 130 well-kept dog toilets and 7 fields for dogs to do their business, had been installed since 1990. This commendable initiative did not finds its peer in Europe. Recently the City had undertaken a second action. The nineteenth century batteries of free public urinals for men were partly renewed and partly completed by some brand new models, thirty six in total. Everything was done to pamper these users as well. Aerodynamic, high tech (on solar energy and with no water use), with smooth inox walls, these showpieces flaunt all over the city. Give credit where credit is due, the City of Ghent was awarded the "At Home in the City 2004"-prize. And rightly so, at least it would be if they had not forgotten about a substantial part of the city users: women. Apparently, this group was ranked lower than the dog community. This discrimination was noticeable even more strongly during big events, e.g. the Festival of Ghent. Women needed to shuffle along for the door of the few available toilet containers, and on top of that, they had to pay to use them. In the meantime, men could enjoy sanitary equipment for free. This unjust situation was denounced by the campaign "Do not silence my Bladder". Baharak Bashar, a Belgian woman with Iranian roots, set up the campaign in November 2004. The immediate cause was her experience that she almost had to pay a 50 euro fine for peeing in public and a 250 euro fine for public indecency. The campaign to push the authorities that were in charge (provinces, city governments, ...) to take the necessary measures to offer free sanitary equipment for women as well, started with a petition. Quite soon it reached the media, such as the newspapers, the radio and a popular television program on Flemish television. Later on, the campaign expanded. A website was made (www.plasactie.be), several partners got involved, and a strategy was developed. Different activities were undertaken and are still in development. Last year the action group received a grant from Christian Dupont, the Minister of Equal Opportunities and Big Cities Policy, to organise a unisex toilet design competition and to set up a special toilet sign on the urinals about where to find a woman toilet for free in the nearest pub. As members of the action group, we can shed light on the evolution, experiences and concrete results of this form of urban activism. This immediately explains why we are interested in the subject of the workshop.
Arianna Bassoli: The Peep
I had heard before about those toilets that have one-way mirrors, so that the person inside can see outside but people outside can only see their reflection. I finally experienced one of them in a restaurant/bar in NYC, called 'Peep', where the bathroom, situated half-way through the dining area, is a rather big room separated from the outside space by a one-way mirror. The room is quite dark and the toilets face the outside, so that when you are sitting there you cannot avoid looking at people eating and talking, who are both unaware of you and still so close to you. Another odd aspect of this bathroom is that instead of the mirror, on top of the sink, there is a television showing black and white movies.
I'm not sure what the intention of the architect was when planning such a public toilet, but perhaps the idea was to create a private space within a crowded place of friends and strangers, which is what bars and restaurant are. The soft light, spaciousness of the room and television can provide a comforting and relaxing atmosphere, together with the consciousness of not being alone (fostered by the possibility of seeing other people) and being alone at the same time (because other people cannot see inside).
However, I was far from being relaxed when I was in that bathroom, mainly because I didn't like to see people eating and laughing while sitting on the toilet; it just made me feel uncomfortable. In addition to this, I couldn't help asking myself: 'what if they actually can see inside?', like I didn't trust the technology that was separating me from the outside. Instead of feeling protected, I felt extremely exposed. It could be just me though.
Johanna Brewer: World's Colliding
My toilet story is a second-hand one recounted to me by two of my friends. It's brief (and a bit risque) but for me it represents a few interesting social practices. In a public bathroom in Austin, TX there was a massive amount of graffiti on the walls. Somewhat of a liberal enclave, it was unsurprising that the writing on one side of the bathroom was all in support of vegetarianism, and (being a women's bathroom) the writing on the other half of the bathroom was fervently in support of lesbianism. As the amount of graffiti grew over time, the two halves of the bathroom became full of writing and finally collided with the perfectly unifying statement of "Eat Pussy, Not Cows."
For me this is of course humorous, but it represents a form of asynchronous mass-communication that is highly situated. These conversations persist and whether we actively speak back to them, they allow us to get a sense of the venue, the neighborhood and even the city in which the toilet is located. And in the case of this specific story, even though I didn't visit this bathroom in person, not one, but two of my friends chose to share their experiences of it with me. And indeed, using various mobile technologies, many of my friends have pulled snippets of these toilet conversations out of one context and place them in another - e.g., on photo-sharing sites like flickr and radar. To illustrate this I've included a few toilet graffiti photos from myself and from friends. Notably the photos were taken in the bathrooms of trendy bars/cafes in Chicago in New York.
Karen Martin: Double Loo
We were in a pub close to my house, myself, Anne-Marie, Arianna and Anand. Three girls and one boy. A pub I hadn't visited before. I got up from the table to go to the toilets. 'You have to go in the last cubicle on the right' said Anne-Marie. 'Why?' I asked. 'You'll see.'
Intrigued I went into the ladies. There were only three cubicles and the one on the far right was free. Inside I found a double loo. Two porcelain toilets with mahogany seats sitting side by side behind a single cubicle door. But why?? I wondered. For friends who don't like to be separated? For parents with children? Can't one of the pair just wait?
I washed my hands and left the bathroom. At the table I had to ask Anne-Marie, 'Why do you think it's like that? It's so weird!' 'What is??' asked Arianna and Anand. 'I don't want to say, you should go and look for yourself.' Arianna got up and went towards the loos. 'Well, I can't go can I.' said Anand grumpily. 'What is it?'
Arianna returned, 'Wow, that's pretty unusual' she said. 'WHAT IS??' asked Anand. 'I wonder why they would do that?' she continued. 'Do you think people hold hands while they are in there?' asked Anne-Marie. 'Urgghh' Arianna and I laughed. 'What are you talking about?!' asked Anand. 'I want to see!'
Anne-Marie gave in. She took Anands phone that was on the table and disappeared. A minute later she was back. 'There' she said, handing him the phone. Two low resolution images showed the double loo. 'Ahh.' Said Anand, satisfied.
