The Office of Erik Dahl

Signage Obscura & Root Problems

Sometimes design solutions don’t address the root problem and subsequently cause problems of their own.

I had to use the toilet at the dentist office before my appointment the other day, and came across this obscured sign.

“Please do not flush paper towels”

The sign itself isn’t novel. It’s not like my dentist is the only one encountering this problem. What’s interesting here is the design problem. Not with the sign itself, and ultimately not with the obscuring of the sign. The question is why is the sign necessary in the first place, and secondarily why did the sign get obscured.

I should have taken several more pictures, but let me try to unpack what’s happening here. You’ll just have to imagine some of it.

Its not uncommon to have signs in public bathroom in service establishments. Most of them say something like “Employees must wash hands before returning to work.”

So, why is the sign necessary to begin with?

Because it is a dentist office, they are using a biohazard style step can in place of a simple, open trash bin. Even though it is just paper towels going into this trash bin they have used the bin with a top on it.

So what, right? Well, not so fast. There are a few things at play. The can is covered, so people can’t immediately see what’s inside. They can’t see that there are other used paper towels, which would signify that their used paper towels can go there as well. Secondly, it doesn’t look like a normal trashcan, it even looks like a biohazard bin that I’ve seen in other doctor’s offices. Oh wait, it is a biohazard bin. By appropriating a biohazard bin and repurposing it as a normal trash bin they have also appropriated the meaning of the original form. Just because they have repurposed it doesn’t mean the object has lost its original meaning to the rest of us. So, we are left with a trash can that doesn’t initially look like a trash can, and to determine its “trash can”-ness we need to perform a physical action of opening the lid to determine its intended meaning.

Okay, so that explains why people may have been putting paper towels in the toilet in the first place, because they didn’t see an appropriate place to put dispose of them and the open receptacle of the toilet offered less resistance both physically and semiotically.

Now, why was the sign obscured?

It was an obvious choice to put the sign (about the paper towels) in close proximity to the paper towels. So when someone retrieved the paper towels they would also be confronted by the accompanying signage. However, they forgot one simple rule/fact/trend/behavior. It’s a fairly common social phenomena for flat surfaces to collect objects. I know it happens in our house all too often, and you can see it with trash all the time in public.

There are solutions for wall mounted soap dispensers and paper towel holders, but obviously wall mounted toothbrush holders is too niche a market. The cup of toothbrushes had to go somewhere.

We are left with a design solution (the sign) that is problematic in its own right, and only attempts to address the symptom of the problem (throwing paper towels in the toilet) and not the root of the problem (people didn’t know where to dispose of their paper towels). The fine folks at my dentist office tried to solve the ‘what’ of the problem and didn’t look to solve the ‘why.’