Female Urinal

Female standing urination has recently caught some attention. Some people believe in this product and there is a website in construction devoted to its cause. I do see the advantages but I do not see a truly commercial application. Skimming this "article" I realize that female urinals are planned to be installed in stalls. Why would a public building or a restaurant install a female urinal instead of a normal toilet? The only advantage of the urinal in mens toilet is to save space by placing the urinals onto a wall instead of having all the toilet users lock themselves into spacious stalls.

The proponents of the female urinal are basing most of their argument in the fact that urinating positions (men stand, women sit or squat) are mostly socially constructed. They just miss the point that the female urinal as an investment is more expensive and less flexible than investing in having cleaner standard toilets.

In this blog I aim to have interesting discussion about new products and innovations. I just posted this topic as an example of a product idea that brings a standard product (male urinal) into a new context (female toilet). The problems are that (i) the proponents stress the social point to a greater extent than the business point and (ii) they are solving a problem the hard way: using bricks and mortar rather than a sponge with bleach.

Article: The Scourge of Arial

I loved this article from the year 2000 the first time I read it. I have now re-read it and found it as interesting as the first time. It tells the story of how the typeface Arial came about. Reading this article you can learn:

• Details about the development of typeface standards at the dawn of the graphic interface era of personal computing ("typefacess" are sometimes inaccurately called "fonts").
• The way the Arial typeface became to dominate the non-designer world because of its inclusion in Microsoft products.
• How Helvetica, The typeface of the 20th century was also the most shamelessly ripped-off design product of the 20th century

What I really like about this article is that you can read it and use all those bits of erudition at cocktail parties.