toilets

Accompanying text

The necessary accompanying text was not part of the image file, but here’s what it says under each panel:

Panel 1: “Instead of being flushed down with as much as a gallon of water, urine simply drains through openings in a specially designed plastic cartridge at the bottom of the bowl.”

Panel 2: “The entry chamber contains a blue liquid—a lighter-than-urine long-chain fatty alcohol. Gravity pulls urine through the liquid, but odors and sewer gases are trapped below.”

Panel 3: “As the urine descends through the cartridge chamber, its flow collides with a barrier, which prevents turbulence from displacing the floating sealant.”

Panel 4: “Urine passes beneath the barrier and into the exit chamber. When the urine level reaches the height of the drain, it spills over and empties into the outbound sewer pipe.”

What works

I appreciate that Peter Grundy, the graphic designer, shows us the macro-scale first and then leaves the detailed working of the smaller catchment valve to the subsequent three panels. When describing something new, it’s good to start at a level that people recognize – presumably, men recognize the basic shape of a urinal more than the recognize the shape of the mechanism that makes it waterless. I probably would have made that first panel slightly bigger than the rest so that we know it isn’t four of the same things at different points in time, but one different thing and three of the same things.

I enjoy the way that the urine is displayed in balls so that it can appear bouncy. The dots are more than simply an enjoyable feature, they also help communicate about a problem in urinal design: backsplash. Urine is a bit bouncier than one might like – the text below the panel explains that dark blue liquid traps odors from seeping up but it is the L-shaped barrier that does most of the backsplash prevention work. I’m guessing it’s actually a combination of the L-shaped barrier and the blue liquid that keeps the urine from splashing. Not enough space for explanatory text to get into those details, but I appreciate the way the diagram brought attention to the backsplash problem and not just the waterlessness.

Another thing: I applaud Grundy for depicting a penis (a stylized penis, but only as stylized as the rest of the diagram) instead of a visual euphemism of the circle-and-arrow ‘male’ sign.

What needs work

The dark blue area is so dark that I initially had to sit and think about whether I was supposed to be reading it as a presence or a void. Perhaps a less dark color would have read more clearly as a presence, something we are meant to notice, than as a void. Yes, I can hear critics pointing out that since the color above the dark blue is white, one would have to assume the dark blue is presence. I speak for my eyeballs and cognitive structures when I say that I had to think about it.

That’s not all where the color critique comes from. Since water is often depicted as blue in diagrams and this diagram was supposed to be about the waterfree urinal, I probably would have chosen a color other than blue, even if the actual liquid in the device is blue. The big point is to remind us that there is no water here – we might lose sight of that amidst all the conventionally blue zones in this diagram.

I also do not quite understand the cylindricalness of this thing because the diagram makes no effort whatsoever to give depth. It’s just a section and a section of a rectangle will look the same as the section of a cylinder. Well. Except that isn’t strictly true. As far back as drafting goes, we know that there were conventions for making sure that cylinders and rectangular solids could be differentiated in section. Those rules might have been handy if extrapolated to fit this case.

The main problem I always run into with diagrams is the balance between image and text. Diagrams, in my experience, end up being more text heavy than other sorts of information graphics. This particular graphic would not work at all without the text, but that may be an unavoidable reality when it comes to diagrams. As I said above, at least the text is subordinate to the images and follows their table layout instead of sort of hanging around the fringes using arrows to connect text to image.

References

Davis, Joshua. (22 June 2010) Pissing Match: Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?. Wired Magazine.

Grundy, Peter. (22 June 2010) “How it doesn’t flush” Wired Magazine. [Diagram]

Falcon Waterfree Technologies.

Water Infrastructure Schematic Diagram*

I put together the diagram above to help me explain how water is delivered and taken away from urban locations. The point I want to make with the diagram is that the infrastructure is designed to deliver water to ‘typical’ buildings and that this means people who are wandering around cities where buildings are all private also lack access to water. There is a political debate going on right now about whether or not access to water is a human right – the UN voted on this and decided water IS a human right but large countries like the US disagreed. When the US does not back UN resolutions, those UN resolutions tend not to mean as much.

So why would the US vote against this resolution? I am not altogether sure, but I believe it has something to do with the fact that many places have privatized their water. Privatization of water takes different faces. Sometimes a system like the one diagrammed above is privatized. Studies have shown that when this happens, the company that sets up a system like the one above delivers a poorer quality product – more sedimentation and other low level contaminants which are the typical results of choosing sources quite close to cities. The closer the source is to the delivery, the lower the expenditure for engineering and installation of water mains, monitoring stations along the route, and reservoirs. The other way in which water can be privatized is through bottling – bottled water in some parts of Africa is more expensive than Coca-Cola. And this in areas that may have no access to safe alternatives for drinking water. Nestle owns the Poland Springs brand and folks in Maine are scrambling to get hydrological studies performed that can prove Nestle’s water extractions are drawing down lake volumes on adjacent properties. The only way to fight Nestle, it seems, is to prove that they are damaging one’s own property and yet water sources – rivers, lakes, oceans, springs – technically do not belong to private individuals. The individuals or corporations can own the land surrounding them, but the water is a bit like air and cannot be owned. (Rights to the fish found in the water CAN be owned. As you can see this gets complicated quickly.)

The diagram above contains none of the politics of the discussion below. For me, it is important to attempt to create graphics that are not political, even when I am creating them for the express purpose of delivering a presentation that takes a side in a political fight. For me, the challenge is two-fold. First, I face the technical difficulty of creating any kind of complex diagram. I’ll leave questions about execution out of this particular discussion though feel free to comment on execution below. Second, when I know I have a political message that I want to keep out of my graphics, I am often too far into my own head to be able to step back and determine whether I have created something that is both comprehensive enough to tell a complete (but apolitical) story and one that does not drift into the political. As it is, this diagram seems to err on the side of being incomplete rather than being more fully detailed where the details start to carry politics with them. My larger point is that this is one way in which cities are exclusionary zones by design. It would be easy to find a way to provide the basic infrastructure to supply water outside of buildings – fire hydrants do just that. But maintaining the ‘last mile’ of infrastructure is almost always completely given over to the private sector. Individuals and companies maintain bathrooms with all of their fixtures, cleaning, and maintenance requirements. This is big business. Just about every shop and restaurant on the street in New York reserves the rights to the bathroom for customers only.

One of Starbucks redeeming qualities is that their bathrooms tend to be open to all, proving that it is possible to continue to service a relatively affluent clientele no matter who is in the bathroom.

Obama on Water

The word on the political street is that even though Obama’s stimulus efforts contain plans to address infrastructure, water infrastructure has been taken off the table at this point. Our water infrastructure is ageing; most of the current infrastructure is due to age out of acceptable functionality in the next ten years. Already there are an average of 240,000 water main breaks. Just yesterday the New York Times reported that a dam outside of Bakersfield is uncomfortably close to catastrophic failure, threatening the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people. There are another 4400 dams in the US that require work in order to fall within comfortable safety ranges. Some are publicly owned, some are privately owned. In either case, it is unclear which entities can foot the bill (projected at $16 billion dollars over 12 years).

*This diagram uses New York City as a guide. Not all cities have overflow valves that risk the release of raw sewage due to increases in rain. What’s more, in New York there are some other systems in place to recapture some of the overflow at the point of release. But this is a different kind of political discussion, one that focuses on the other typical focus of water discussions – the environment.

References

Ascher, Kate. (2005) The Works: Anatomy of a City. New York: The Penguin Press.

Bone, Kevin, ed. and Gina Pollara, Associate Ed. (2006) Water-Works: The architecture and engineering of the New York City water Supply. The Cooper Union School of Architecture, New York: The Monacelli Press.

Bozzo, Sam. (2009) Blue Gold: World Water Wars [Documentary film, available streaming for free]

Davis, Mike. (2006) Planet of Slums. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.

Fountain, Henry. (2011) Danger Pent Up Behind Aging Dams. New York Times. 21 February 2011.

India’s Public Restrooms

In “Squatting with dignity: Lessons from India” Kumar Alok details efforts to increase the provision of sanitation at the household and community level. Along the course of the book, he presents all sorts of interesting data – some of his studies present information rarely gathered in the US. In the first table I’ve chosen (on page 293), Alok demonstrates that even after areas have received ‘Clean Village Awards’ (Nirmal Gram Puraskar = NGP and means Clean Village Award) there is generally still open defecation, one of the key elements that was supposed to have been eradicated in order to achieve the NGP status in the first place. He writes that the reason for this is multiple. Of course, the first problem is the lack of household toilets, then there’s the lack of public toilets both of which force people out into the open. The Clean Village Award was intended as a measure to increase investment in toilet infrastructure and winners in the first year were photographed shaking hands with the President of India. Alok’s deep research revealed that this photo opportunity caused leaders in many villages to seek the award just to have a photo with the President. This increased the number of awardee villages in the second year of the program so much that the President was not able to shake all the hands: “…only few were allowed to personally receive the award from the President of India. For the rest, the photographers did the magic. Using the modern computer tools, they produced photographs of individual PRI members shaking hand with the President of India….There was a serpentine queue outside the photo shops in Bengali Market immediately after the NHP award distribution ceremony was over.”

It is hard to predict just what will stand in the way of public toilet provision. I would never have guessed photoshop (and its knock-offs) could have led to an increase in pro-toilet hype while subverting actual investment in toilet infrastructure.

Where do people in India excrete?

The bars above are a bit clumsy as graphics, but they contextualize the information about open defecation by illustrating where else people might relieve themselves. The IHHL category refers to Individual Household Latrines and is the lowest section of the bars [the color coding does not come through at all]. Basically, this refers to people who use the toilet at home but does not indicate just how those toilets are plumbed. They may or may not be flush toilets. Many of them are not flush toilets. I find it useful to see how much variation there is across space. I also think it is worth noting that there are very few people who report using community or shared toilets. Open defecation is far more common than either of those two categories. In her film Q2P Paromita Vohra shows viewers that women have very few opportunities to use public or shared bathrooms. There are not many public facilities and where they do exist, the women’s areas are often taken over by men, leaving the women without a place to go. What’s more, where women’s rooms are still for women, the women have to pay to pee but men can use urinals in the men’s room for free.

Alok notes that another contributing factor to the relatively high proportion of open defecation is that not all toilets are being used. Sometimes open defecation is preferred. He writes that children are not deemed to need as much privacy as adults and that, furthermore, their feces is not thought to be as ‘dirty’ as adult feces. Thus, children are often allowed to go in the open rather than seeking out toilet facilities. As a result, “in only 51 per cent of the households either children are using toilets or child feces are disposed in the toilet. Forty-one per cent of households dispose feces in open space or along with solide waste, while 3 per cent drain out feces in the drain.” While it may at first seem a bit silly to think that children’s waste is somehow different than adult waste, think about what we do with dog waste. In the US people use hands covered with thin layers of plastic (or paper) to pick up dog poo and then dispose of it as if it were solid waste.

Alok continues to investigate sanitation practices, writing about hand-washing practices. This kind of information is something I would like to see for US-based populations. It is out there for hand-washing following the bathroom but there are not always break downs by what the person was doing (pooping or peeing) and I cannot recall coming across information about hand-washing before eating or after changing diapers…or picking up after dogs.

What works and needs work

My job here is to critique graphics and graphical representation of social science data. The tables and graphs here are not at all easy to use or beautiful to view. But the information is fascinating. It is almost always more important to get the information out in front of a public than to hide it away because it may not be formatted as well as you might like it to be.

References

Alok, Kumar. (2010) Squatting with Dignity: Lessons from India. New Delhi: Sage Publications India.

What works

This is the most graphic of graphic sociology so far. For those of you with delicate constitutions, give yourself a pat on the back for taking a deep breath and deciding to read the rest of this post without tossing it upon first glance.

This was published in 1976 in a book that is now out of print called The Bathroom by Alexander Kira, an architect and professor at Cornell. He was interested in the bathroom as a design challenge with an eye to the ergonomics of the fixtures and spaces commonly encountered in standard bathrooms, home to standard fixtures. The bathroom is not exactly a hotbed of design revolution so many of his ideas are not only still relevant, but still fresh. This particular diagram was used to help sort out how one might go about designing a urinal for women (if not a unisex urinal that could serve both women and men, not at the same time, though).

I usually find the use of photographs in information graphics to be superfluous. Generally, there is some graph about, say poverty or out of wedlock birth and the photograph paired with the graph takes a person and turns them into a token. The homeless man as icon of poverty; the mother and child (usually a woman of color) as icon of poignant nurturance. That sort of reductive photography has no place in information graphics. Quite frankly, I’d be happy never to see predictable, reductionist photography like that anywhere.

But in this case, Kira used a grid in the photo shoot turning the resulting photograph into an infographic. Did I mention that his ideas still seem fresh? With the grid, we have a much easier time making the visual comparison between trajectories of urine between women and men.

Imagine you are a urinal designer. Ask yourself: how would I use these diagrams to help me design a urinal that works for women? Realize that you would either pursue a trough strategy or, better, a urinal that women do not face. They could stand with their backs to it and bend forward like the woman in the third panel is doing. Of course, there are sartorial concerns. Backing up to a urinal works just fine if you are naked, like our urination model is. But what if she’s wearing clothing? That’s a different design challenge. I would be interested to see what would be possible by relocating pants’ zippers so that they open between the legs rather than in the front.

What needs work

I apologize that in some of these panels it is hard to see the stream of urine, which is a necessary piece of information. With the women, it’s pretty much straight down except when bent over at the waist. For the men, it is slightly in front of the body unless he is holding his penis in which case the trajectory is quite a bit in front of him — it leaves the photographic frame.

Reference

Kira, Alexander. (1976) The Bathroom New York: Viking Adult. [out of print]

What’s new?

If you read the blog regularly, you’ve seen this before. So what’s new, you ask? Well, for one thing, we decided it was necessary to add a lactation area. It’s adjacent to the attendant’s booth; in a perfect world the attendant can watch the stroller while mom pumps or breastfeeds. The divider between the lactation area and the attendant’s booth is a heavy curtain – like a theatre’s curtain – so that if mom has little kids running around, there are fewer places for fingers to be pinched. Swinging doors and small children have been known to be a bad combination, especially when mom may not be able to react in a lightening quick fashion as she is in the midst of feeding a different child or pumping (or changing a different child’s diaper). Furthermore, the lactation area is near the attendant to lend the sensibility and the reality of extra watchfulness over both mom’s with their breasts out and the potentially escaping toddlers. This configuration also places the lactation area just about as far away from the noise and commotion of the rest of the bathroom as is possible. Nobody likes to eat where others…well, you know what I mean. We included a changing area in here in addition to the one in the main space because we figured it would be more convenient for moms who are breastfeeding to have the opportunity to change a baby right in the same spot. There wasn’t enough space for a toilet (for mom herself, or for accompanying folks like dads, siblings, and nannies). We were hoping to have space for at least two lactating moms or a lactating mom and a dad to fit in this cubby of a space. But I’ll leave it as an open question? Should we have fully enclosed this space and put a toilet in there? Or is it better that two moms can do what they need to do at the same time? Leaving it a little bigger and not stuffed with a toilet also means dad or grandma or whoever is part of the crew can have a spot next to mom while she pumps or breastfeeds.

Adding the lactation area forced us to reorient the attendant’s booth to face mostly into the main bathroom area. There is still a small window on the right hand side which will be the first thing most people see as they enter the bathroom. Folks who are a little shy about asking for tampons or clean needles or whatever like that might be able to approach the smaller, more private side window rather than the big one in the front. However, from the big front window, the attendant will be able to see most of what is going on in the main space, save for the urinal area. There was discussion of adding a one-way mirror between the attendant’s booth and the urinals, high enough so that no penises would be in view. This would allow the attendant to be within site of just about everything, save the individual stalls. Safety would be increased, privacy would be decreased. What do you think? Mirror or no mirror? Remember, the one-way mirror would be located too high to see any penises unless those penises were attached to someone standing well away from a urinal.

What’s new?

In this office scale version, I reconfigured some of the wall segments and added a completely new one in the middle of the space after a commenter on this blog mentioned that visibility into (and out of) the urinals might not be desirable and would be easy to screen. He was right. Now men can be more comfortable knowing that they cannot be seen and nobody will spot the back of a man at a urinal upon stepping into the bathroom. There are still more stalls than urinals – better for women and men, if you ask me. Not better for the environment since toilets use far more water than urinals (especially when the urinals are waterless, as they now are in many new construction projects).

Style points?

I admit these are not the most stylish of plans. I’m not an architect and not aware of all the style conventions employed to make plans both interesting and legible. I’m taking opinions on what to change. Bring it on, folks, bring it on.

I decided to give the sinks a radial gradient though now I’m not sure if it’s obvious that they are sinks. I made the font bigger in the stadium version because it appears that our publisher will be printing it at about the same scale as the one you see above. Small.

The book?

The book – “Toilet: The Public Restroom and the Politics of Sharing” will come out on World Toilet Day, November 19, 2010. These two images, or images quite like these, will appear in the concluding chapter by Harvey Molotch.