Open the Bathroom Door With Your Foot!

A group of students from Minnesota have come up with this useful product. Part of its beauty is how simple and intuitive it seems.
It was showcased on core 77.

It's called the Toepener and they even have a ridiculous video...

MIT Students Catalogue Campus Toilets!

Check out this piece, posted on The Tech by Joanna Kao and Robert McQueen cataloguing the bathrooms aroung MIT. There's even one to sleep in!?

Controlling Video Games With Your Pee

Amazing! Definitely amazing and amusing, this might well have been spawned in the mind of a Japanese advertising genius, but I think this is here to stay. And in my opinion, the secret of its success is that it's actually outing an activity that has definitely featured in the amusements of most men. C'mon, admit it. You've obviously written your name in the snow with your urine if not played with your stream across a urinal or a bathroom wall...

Here you are, ladies and gents: courtesy of Singularity Hub (and my friend Andy), we present a future urinal game that will no doubt address the inequality in the time it takes for men and women to do their thing in the toilet. So gals, if your date disappears for a suspiciously long time to answer the call of nature, and returns having dowsed himself in his own piss, you might be wise to his activities.

Original article here

In the early ’90s, Sega held 65% of the US video game console market, had millions of fans, and was considered one of the premier creators of modern gaming entertainment. Today, they are helping you play with your pee. The Japan branch of the multinational company recently announced that they are testing their Toylets male urinal video game at select locations around Tokyo. Toylets uses a pressure sensor located on the back of the urinal to measure the strength and location of your urine stream. A small LCD screen above the urinal allows you to play several simple video games including a simulator for erasing graffiti and a variation on a sumo wrestling match. At the end of a game, the screen displays advertisements. Normally when I see something like this I would reach for my enormous “WTF, JAPAN?” flag, wave it around a few times and then return to my life without giving it much further thought. However, I can’t seem to get Toylets out of my mind, because I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s secretly brilliant and maybe even a sign of things to come. Whether you find the concept hilarious, disturbing, or disgusting, urinal video games are simply another way that interactive media could invade every part of our lives. It also shows that no space is safe from digital ads.

Don't like graffiti? Who does? Use your urine to wash it away, and compete in this time trial.

First, let’s have a big round of honesty here. How many guys out there have never made a game out of peeing? (Liars.) Sure, it’s childish, but maybe it’s part of the male psyche. Now, look at Toylets. Very weird, very childish, but…c’mon…if it just so happened to be in the bathroom you were using you would play it, right? The game could be enticing to that silly part of you that finds peeing fun, and it definitely is trying to appeal to its (presumably) male audience. According to Sega and Akihabara News, the four types of video games on the Toylets include:

“Mannekin Pis”: a simple measurement of the urine produced.
“Graffiti Eraser”: where you move your urine back and forth to remove paint
“The North Wind and Her”: a game where you play the wind, trying to blow a girl’s skirt up. The stronger you pee, the stronger the wind blows.
“Milk from Nose”: A variation on sumo wrestling, where you try to knock the other player out of the ring using the strength of your urine flow (shown as milk spraying from your nose). The record of your pee is saved and used as the opponent for the next player. So the game is sort of multiplayer. Toylets even lets you save information onto a USB drive! I fear the MMORPG that will arise from this.

The Milk from Nose game lets you compete against past users for strongest flow. Pee, pee for victory!

Getting men to enjoy using a urinal is simply one side of the equation, however. Making money is the other. Digital signs are already in many bathrooms in major cities in the US. I remember seeing them in New York back as far back as 2007. Mostly these ads were ignored like all other things in the Men’s restroom. But what if that ad was part of a video game…you might pay more attention to it then. Making advertisements interactive is one of the ways in which the marketing medium is evolving, and you can see that phenomenon everywhere on the internet from Facebook to pop-up ads. The other big innovation, making ads personalized, is also creeping from the digital world into reality. Considering that Toylets allows you to save data to a USB, there are chances we’ll see the same sort of customization available there as well.

Oh, sure, you'd want to save your high score... WTF, JAPAN!

According to Sega, the Toylets games will be on trial at their testing locations until the end of January 2011. After that, it’s anybody’s guess as to where Sega will take them from there. The era of urinal video gaming could die as quickly as it was born, relegated to the dark corners of WTF history. Or, just maybe, we’ll see more of these interactive bathroom shenanigans in our future. 15 years ago, Sega’s market share fell into the crapper. It would only be fair if the crapper helped them get back on top again.

Sit Or Squat

Finally, an online resource that allows you to locate bathrooms in your vicinity! This is so important, especially for users with children, caregivers and the elderly.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Sit Or Squat

Not only is there an online resource, but it seems that there's also a mobile version, which I'll have to check out. This is obviously an important resource for the purely utilitarian reason that finding a toilet can be a desperate and unfortunately difficult task. In addition, this site moves towards the valuable task of exposing and shaming the invisibility of the public peeing problem. If the issue were dealt with openly, instead of with reticence caused by embarrassment associated with elimination, then we could actually advocate for better facilities and demand our local governments provide serious resources where they are needed.

toilet paper as design element

from improvised life

No need to hide supplies of toilet paper in the closet…

Toilet paper as objet…

The love affair with graffiti continues

It turns out a lot of people are fascinated by graffiti in bathrooms. I wonder how many pictures are taken every day of subversive art on the walls of stalls. I try to always have my camera or phone with me when I go.

The topic of graffiti came up again for me recently, in regard to urban violence and crime. There is something about finding graffiti on the walls of a public bathroom that suggests the establishment doesn't pay particular attention to the upkeep, or that they can't enforce rules prohibiting defacing property. Tags are sometimes considered to be territorial markings of gangs, and the question remains about whether graffiti as "art" should be treated the same as, and removed along with profanity and offensive slogans. Banksy has really problematized this debate by making graffiti and other public art installations both aesthetic and political.

Returning to the bathroom graffiti, I think it has become more complicated. I do not feel that graffiti automatically suggests I am in an unsafe establishment. These days, having graffiti in the bathrooms is as much a fashion statement.

Here's a new addition, a nerdy little character that tickled me. This bathroom was in New York City.

And I also recently discovered the Bathroom Graffiti Project, documenting graffiti to create an archive of the world's toilets. Check them out here.

I wonder if bathrooms will ever integrate rolling display technology into their bathroom design, perhaps including an interface in which you can draw new graffiti. Why not make this into a community art project--seeing as its happening already. We could open up the forums through which to produce graffitiart, and see what we get when we mount it in the bathroom.

(Not Always So Distant) History of The Toilet

Sam Biddle's account of the history of the toilet was interesting, though I found myself more impressed by how many playful euphemisms he managed to find for the toilet itself and the act of flushing it.

The Long, Unglamorous History of the Toilet

Nobody is entirely sure who first had the privilege of sitting on a toilet. Evidence of advanced plumbing systems in the ancient world abounds, but it's a strange, meandering path from antiquity to checking your inbox on the can.

Ancient cultures were surprisingly adept at moving water around in a way that kept people from having to walk through pools of their own feces. (That was really more of a Medieval European thing.) Cultures as far back as 3000 BC were flushing away their problems—so who you callin' primitive? Members of the Harrappa civilization in what is now India had toilets in their homes that drained into subterranean clay chambers. The residents of Skara Brae, a 31st century BC settlement in what's now Scotland, were even clever enough to use a draining system that exploited a nearby river to automatically sweep out their dirty business.

Fast forward a few thousand years, and the Romans were at the forefront of whooshing away waste. Massive aqueducts—engineering feats in themselves—brought massive volumes of fresh water into Roman cities. Rome's famed public baths were well stocked with urinal-style toilets that drained into its meticulous sewage system—though private commodes were a rarity reserved for elites.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, the rudimentary latrine (and notions of public sanitation) were widely lost in the west. If being chased down by roaming Visigoths was the worst thing that happened to you on a given day, at least you didn't step in an open cesspool or have a chamberpot emptied on your head from above. At that point, the highest end of the defecation spectrum was the use of ornamental chamber pots, disguised to look like a stack of books or decorative box. But the basic bedpan-deposit remained the status quo—a decidedly low-tech approach.

So who ended the stinky terror of the Dark Ages? Many historians believe credit is due to John Harrington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Harrington, a notorious royal troublemaker, published a satirical pamphlet in 1596 that served as both a social critique against his peers and a detailed instruction manual for the assembly of the first flush toilet. Talented guy! Harrington's toilet (found only in a few royal homes) included a mechanical valve to seal off the toilet, as well as a tank of water to flush it—basic components still used in our modern thrones. It wasn't until a couple of hundred years later, in 1775, that the first patent for the flushing toilet was granted to Scottish inventor Alexander Cummings. Cumming's coup was the addition of a constant pool of water in the toilet, so as to suppress, um, really, really bad smells.

From here, the toilet's path is a gradual mixture of small innovations—no great leap forward to the john we all know so dearly now. 18th century inventors refined the flushing mechanism and flow of water, with their 19th century successors adding better drainage and valves that (thankfully) leaked less. English plumber Thomas Crapper—a coincidence, I promise—did much to popularized the private flushing toilet in Europe, leading many to falsely believe he invented it. The only great toilet innovation of the 20th was that of integrating the water tank into the seat itself, rather than attaching it to a wall. Beyond that, a hundred years of slight tinkering haven't advanced the basic design beyond this point.

So where's the toilet heading? It's hard to say they're progressing much farther than where they are now—unless you consider lavish design concepts and Twitter integration progress. And frankly, if I have to choose between the Dark Ages and an era when people are tweeting their poop, I might choose the former.

On the other hand, it's possible all these centuries of development have been leading us astray. While it's unimaginable for most of us to think about doing anything other than sitting on a toilet, Slate investigates a growing body of research shows that the squatters of the Dark Ages (and, oh yeah, the 1.2 billion forgotten people too poor to own a toilet) are pooping the way we were meant to. And us upright snobs, auto-tweeting our flushes? We're possibly doing our bodies harm. Some scientists believe that merely sitting on the toilet bends our innards in a way we were never meant to be while relieving ourselves, leading to hemorrhoids, and other gastrointestinal maladies.

To make the experience more palatable for those of who find the idea of squatting over a toilet sort of, well, gross, a budding market of toilet adapters—including the wonderfully euphemistic "Lillipad"—has popped up to help us poop better. Squatting proselytizer Jonathan Isbit has patented his own approach, after returning from a meditation tour with an enlightened perspective on the toilet. Isbit hopes his "Nature's Platform," crafted from powder coated steel tubes, will "convert the Western world back to the natural squatting position."

So perhaps 4,000 years of inventing have just led us back where we began. Regardless of your stance (har!) on the matter, the toilet remains an object of both continuous invisibility (what else could we take more for granted?) and consistent tinkering. Most of us are just happy to be done with it and have a chance to play Angry Birds for ten minutes, but perhaps we'll live to see the next evolution of the humble toilet.

Check out the original post here.

Squatting, eh? That reminds me an awful lot of the pit latrines I had the privilege of squatting over in East Africa... Not EVERYONE in this world is now tweeting on the crapper. But I suppose most of the readers of this page fit into that category. In any case, on an exciting historical note, I did see a water closet in Zanzibar, of all places! Ever wondered what why the toilet it called W.C.? It's a water closet, silly. And the Sultan of Oman had one in his palace, I believe.


The beauty of this is that you do your business into the porcelain bowl, and then yse a little of the water stored in the tank above to "flush" then when you close it, the delightful mixture of water and waste is stored lower down in a removable tank, that presumably your servants can empty! genius. Take that, Toto! Who needs rear and front cleansing when you have a servant!

Another amusing revelation from the article: Britain is, as I've always suspected, still stuck in the last century as far as design. Biddle writes, "The only great toilet innovation of the 20th was that of integrating the water tank into the seat itself, rather than attaching it to a wall. Beyond that, a hundred years of slight tinkering haven't advanced the basic design beyond this point."


Yes, in England, you'll often still find toilets with the flush handle high up, attached to the tank near the ceiling. All of the toilets at my primary school were of this design.
As with this specimen, seen and used in Canterburry, Kent, the tank might be sneakily disguised as lost storage space up above, with a delightful chain for the pulling.