Redesigning Interaction: Intangible Interaction
Part 1
Russell and I are partnered for our first Intangible Interaction project. We decided to go to our gender bathrooms respectively and take notes on the observations we made.
I decided to break down the woman’s bathroom into intangible and tangible interactions that interested me and observe the various sensors and their activities.
Intangible Interactions:
Flush
Sink / faucet
Tangible Interactions:
Door
Sanitary napkin paper and sanitary disposal bins
Flush:
From what I believe, the flush has motion sensors that uses infrared sensors to detect the body heat. From my personal experience, the flush has not always been very accurate and effective. The flush is activated once the user walks away as the infrared sensor detects the loss of heat and activates the flush mechanism. This could mean, that if the user moves their position even by a little, outside the radius of the infrared detection, the flush could get activated. The flush that I tested did not have an output that signaled it had detected motion, hence, the user cannot tell when the flush would go off, or whether it did not detect anything at all.
Sink:
My guess is that the sink / faucet uses the distance sensor to detect the hand under the faucet. The faucet would have a prefixed threshold beyond which it cannot detect the hand, hence the user has to intentionally have the need to wash their hands the distance sensor to detect the hand. In my opinion, this is decently successful as the water does not run if there is no hand detected and the threshold perfectly detects the distance to which a user would naturally place their hands for the water to run (right under the faucet). This is a successful design as the sensor is placed right behind the faucet, not missing a chance to detect as the user intuitively places his/her hands below the faucet for usage.
Door:
The bathroom doors really interest me. There is this funny gap once the door shuts through which someone on the outside can subtly watch a person on the inside of the booth. I also find it interesting that the doors and manual and not automatic, accounting the germs/ bacteria that would have been collected on the door handles and locks.
Sanitary napkins and sanitary disposal bins:
I find the same reason for the sanitary napkins and disposal bins to be a unhygienic as it requires a manual interaction for usage and is not triggered by any distance/ motion inputs.
The red circle shows the position of the sensor, the blue circle shows the output of the mechanism, the green circle shows the areas that require manual input and the yellow circle shows the LED that triggers as the mechanism is activated.
