It utterly fails to satisfy one of the main requirements of using the bathroom: privacy.
Using the toilet is a necessary activity in which we should feel free to relax and do our business in peace. I’m sure there are others like myself who sometimes find ourselves sitting on the toilet scrolling through our phones, an act that we do not wish to be judged for. How would we feel if we knew that others could watch us? If you look closely at the picture above, the person pointing the camera at the mirror can make eye contact with the person on the toilet through the gap in the stall door. Awkward.
A key purpose of a bathroom stall door is to maintain anonymity. Personally, it is unsettling to think that a random person who lives on my floor recognizes that it is me “doing my business” behind that stall.
The gap is a problem for both parties.
As much as the people on the toilet might feel self-conscious using the toilet knowing that they can be watched, it can also be very awkward for the people outside the stall. Imagine looking in the mirror and meeting someone’s eye through the gap while they’re on the toilet, perhaps by accident. It can be embarrassing and sometimes a bit creepy. Take a look at the picture below:
Sitting on the toilet, I have a relatively good view of the person outside the stall! We use the bathroom mirror for several reasons, and whether it is to check ourselves out after we get ready, to pluck our eyebrows or to pick something out of our teeth, we are not keen on having an observer.
Neither beauty nor utility.
Oftentimes, one of the arguments of having a design that is not very functional is beauty, or rather how aesthetically pleasing it is. These doors are neither beautiful nor doing their job well. They are not particularly stylish. What makes this so frustrating is that this problem could have easily been avoided by simply choosing different door hinges, ones that are designed so that the door is closer to the wall to avoid the gap. It makes me wonder why these particular hinges were chosen. Was it simply out of affordability? Did the designers not think this through properly and these hinges were the only ones that could work after the other fixtures were put in place? Whatever the reason was for this poor design, these stall doors do not afford as much privacy as we’d like.
As a resident of West College whose trips to the bathroom are sometimes slightly awkward and usually involve me averting my eyes to avoid looking through the gap at someone else, this door design was the first example that came to mind when I thought about bad design. If we’re going off Dieter Rams’ principles of good design, these designs fail to be aesthetic, unobstrusive, innovative, thorough, and does not make the door particularly useful.
Credits: Thanks to my friend and fellow West College resident, Isaiah Krugman, for his role as bathroom model and photographer.