TOILETS
Here's a question: Who are toilets for? No, seriously. Toilets are something I very rarely hear anyone talking (or, more appropriately, complaining) about. So it seems to me most folks are generally pleased with the Western porcelain potty. But how can that be? Toilets must be the very worst bit of lavatorial equipment we have, among a whole suite of terrible equipment, while also being a universal requisite. (Most paper towel dispensers and hand driers are just terrible but we don't all have them in our homes.)
How bad are they? Well, certainly everyone who's ever used one has been splashed. No? And it seems safe to assume no one likes having their nether regions lapped by water from even the cleanest communal toilet. Probably a fair bet, I'd say. But then some bodies and parts of bodies sit closer to the resident water also, making them considerably more splash-able. Right? Gross! So, what, there just isn't a design solution for this? And there's not been any useful innovation of any kind in a century? Weird.
But the problem with our toilets goes far beyond getting wet. (That's just the least problematic feature, and what should have been the last straw motivating us to finally fix them...) Toilet bowls themselves and the seats that fold down atop them – those ones, presumably, designed for human bodies to alight upon – are not commonly shaped to accommodate perfectly normal and average human anatomy. The inner curvature of the bowl, the bowl's bevelled front lip, as well as the inner rim of most seats can be less than an ideal distance from to a normally-seated male body, one of typical shape and size and all behaving in a normal manner.
But then, along with this, virtually no toilet is suitable for atypical bodies or larger people. And, as everyone knows, toilets are of standard height and have seats of standard circumference to fit average adult bodies. As such they're perfectly designed to not work for children or anyone at the shorter end of the totally normal spectrum of human height. Does that mean toilets are designed with only an idealized female form in mind? Seems so. But that wouldn't even make sense. So, what's another explanation?
Further, it's not like these things are in their design infancy, in phase alpha or beta, and have just now hit a few test markets, and we find ourselves guinea pigs of some radical industrial design firm attempting to “move fast and break things.” So what explains this whole phenomena? Just a total lack of attention to detail? Or is the toilet a particularly confounding set of extremely complex design problems? I really don't know. And so far I've been unable to dig up a reasonable explanation.
What I do know is that we've figured out more than twenty methods for brewing coffee, each with countless forms of tools, all in varied styles. We brew using pressure, in the form of the espresso machine, Moka pot, and Aeropress; we steep using the French press, coffee bag, SoftBrew, and vacuum (or siphon) pot; we use filtration methods via percolator, Chemex, Vietnamese drip, Hario, Kalita, Clever, or a Bee House dripper; we boil, as in Turkish or cowboy coffee; and we do nitrus and cold-brew as well. All this for brown water! But pooping, an even more widespread phenomena than coffee, yields essentially one terrible generic response from the entire North American design community? Bold.
