Dunny Design

The fact that my emerging interest in Human Factors/Ergonomics and design (see here) coincided to a large degree with me having to spend a lot of time in toilets due to colitis (see here), has meant I’ve developed a, some would say “unhealthy”, obsession fascination interest in the way toilets and bathrooms are designed. It basically means that every time I go into a toilet or a bathroom, I’m paying more attention to what’s around me than I used to. This will include observing things such as taps, sinks, doors, locks, signage, layout (pretty much everything really!), and thinking about the potential impacts, both positive and negative, that these “99% invisible” features have on aspects of life such as personal hygiene, public health, privacy, accessibility, usability, aesthetics and so on.

Continue reading “Dunny Design”

A Challenge to Cloth Theatre Caps?

In recent months the “Theatre Cap Challenge” has been picking up steam on Twitter & has had significant coverage on mainstream media as well. In case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, you can check out my video in this post or check out the twitter feed below.

While it’s been great seeing this initiative gain momentum, it seems that a significant number of people are hitting a hurdle in adopting it because their hospital doesn’t allow reusable cloth caps citing infection control concerns. In Australia, the ACORN standard is usually cited as the reason for not allowing them, though not all hospitals are interpreting the standard in the same way, and the standard itself allows individual hospitals to develop their own policy on cloth caps.

Continue reading “A Challenge to Cloth Theatre Caps?”

Patient Work in the Twitterverse

Following my recent post on Patient Work, I decided to do what i normally do when I want to research something and headed over to Twitter. I did a search using the hashtag #PatientWork and was surprised to discover that at that time (2/3/18) there was a total of only 25 tweets, the earliest one being from 2012. Furthermore, 5 of them were mine, and 7 were used in a sense that was unrelated to what I was interested in leaving only 13 of relevance to me that predated my interest in the topic! I think this confirms Holden’s opinion (quoted in my earlier post) that this area is under-represented in the HF/E area. I might have to see if I can do something about that!