Bathrooms are important to employees, for many more than the obvious reasons.
Users “read” bathrooms for signs of management’s actual opinions and values; messages sent by financial expenditures in physical things are seen as more likely to be consistent with an organization’s true opinions than easy to pen and ignore values-type written statements. Workers are keenly attuned to whether the signals sent by restroom design and maintenance indicate that they are respected by management, or not. Interpretations of nonverbal environmental cues can be important drivers of professional performance; the more positive messages are perceived to be, the more likely employees are to perform to their full potential.
At-work bathrooms are also acquiring another important function – in some newer offices, bathroom stalls are the only place where employees have the privacy needed to make sense of workplace situations.
The vital psychological functions of workplace bathrooms also now include being gender-inclusive, which requires that all users feel welcome.
Developing guidelines/best practices for gender-inclusive public bathrooms has been challenging and there are several online resources that people designing public bathrooms today may find particularly handy:
>At JSA (Joel Sanders Architect )that firm has republished “Stalled: Gender-Neutral Public Bathrooms,” written by Joel Sanders and Susan Stryker, which originally appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly, from Duke University Press. The “Stalled…“ article provides context for recent events and restroom design recommendations. The authors, for example, support “eliminate[ing] gender segregated facilities entirely and treat[ing] the public restroom as one single open space with fully enclosed stalls…our bathroom precinct is conceived of as one open space subdivided into activity zones to accommodate the three activities that typically take place in public restrooms – coifing, washing, and eliminating…Our design proposal conceives of the bathroom precinct as three parallel and overlapping activity zones…Double-sided, freestanding, full-length mirrors arranged as linear screens allow people, depending on their mood or temperament, to coif either partially concealed or in full view of others. In our proposal, washing occurs around a freestanding island inspired by the public fountains that activate Roman piazzas…Elimination takes place in private stalls, treated like cabanas, that can be deployed in various configurations.”
>Stalled! provides information on bathroom design options here: https://www.stalled.online/approaches. Stalled!’s website reports that “Stalled! was formed in 2015…The project assembles a cross-disciplinary research team that includes architect Joel Sanders, transgender historian Susan Stryker, and legal scholar Terry Kogan.”
>In a Quartz article, available at https://qz.com/933704/how-to-design-transgender-friendly-bathrooms-that-make-people-of-all-genders-feel-safe/Lisa Davis presents a roundup of gender-nclusive bathroom design options she was able to identify, often by interviewing architects.
As designers, managers, users, and others develop additional insights into welcoming bathroom design, related resources can and will expand the discussion begun by the materials listed above.
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections(www.researchdesignconnections.com).Research Design Connectionsreports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture(Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design(Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.