Tackling the problem of developing world sanitation head-on.Waterborne diseases like diarrhea will never be sexy, pet causes. Nonetheless, an eighth of the world’s population lacks access to safe drinking water, and 2.5 billion people live without proper sanitation. Women in developing countries spend hours each day collecting water, slums are strewn with “flying toilets” (plastic bags tossed right into streets), and 443 million school days are lost each year to water-related illness.”At a global, political level, and certainly at cocktails parties, people don’t want to talk about the fact that the poor are defecating in open fields or into plastic bags,” says Patricia Dandonoli, the former president and CEO of the nonprofit WaterAid America, part of the global WaterAid network. (Dandonoli recently left WaterAid.) To make the discussion more palatable, WaterAid conceived Adventures of Super Toilet, an animated short that’s been screened on local TV in Nigeria and in classrooms in India. The cartoon teaches kids about hygiene through the tale of a squishy, germy villain named Vinny the Poo, a flying Super Toilet, a hip DJ called Soapy Hero, and the dainty Driplette who reveals creepy, crawly parasites in water.Working primarily in rural Africa and Asia, WaterAid partners with local governments and NGOs to install simple, affordable, and environmentally sustainable water systems, including rainwater harvesting, hand pump wells, and solar disinfection. Since its founding in 1981, WaterAid has reached 12 million people and is improving the lives of a million more each year. Its most common installation, the rope pump well, requires little more than a rope, a bicycle wheel, and a gasket. When WaterAid leaves a site, it sets up a local “management committee” to maintain the system and price water fairly so it can benefit even those living on a dollar a day. In countries like Madagascar and Tanzania, WaterAid even helped develop national water and sanitation plans. “We’re there to help and provide a safety net,” says Dandonoli, “but ultimately the responsibility resides with government.”Photo courtesy of WaterAidReturn to interactive site
It can be frustrating seeing change for change’s sake in the world. To be more specific, changes that are said to be done in the name of innovation and design, but are in truth ways for companies to save a buck.
One example that is getting attention is the bathroom doors in hotels… or the lack thereof, actually. One TikToker has had enough and has taken it upon herself to save regular bathroom doors in hotels and to point out why open-space bathrooms and glass doors just don’t cut it.
On her @bring_back_doors TikTok account, Sadie has a collection of videos highlighting the flaws in hotel bathroom designs, with the most prominent being the lack of a regular door to the bathroom. In one viral TikTok, Sadie discussed a hotel that reached out to her, explaining that they have “foggy” glass doors to their bathroom to provide privacy. She was quick to point out that it still doesn’t provide adequate privacy. “Yes you can see through these,” Sadie said, adding that “glass doors do not close properly.”
Hotel name: Alexander Hotel, Noordwijk aan Zee, Netherlands I need to be clear. Glass doors are not private. And making them foggy does not make them private. I am once again sitting here saying screw you to all bathroom doors that are not solid and close fully. And I am providing alternative hotels with guaranteed doors at bringbackdoors.com Check your hotels door situation before you book or risk your privacy. Door submitted by @mmargaridahb, DM me to submit your own bad doors. #bathroomdoors#hotel#travel#fyp Bathroom doors | bathroom design | hotel design | bad hotel design | travel fail | travel memories | travel inspo | door design | hotels with privacy
The comments rallied behind Sadie’s bathroom-door crusade
The commenters joined in with Sadie, demanding the return of solid, closing, and lockable doors to bathrooms in hotels:
“I HATE how hotels started thinking going to the bathroom is a shared experience.”
“I hate how you can’t turn the bathroom light on without disturbing the other person in the room.”
“The foggy ones are almost worse, you just get a hazy fleshy silhouette hunched over on the crapper like some kind of sack of ham.”
“I just don’t get it, NOBODY wants this, even couples. I won’t be more likely to book two separate rooms for me and my friend/sibling/parent, I’ll just book another hotel.”
“Love this campaign, I do not want a romantic weekend listening to the other person poo.”
Hotel Names⬇️⬇️ Citizen M South Hotel (first pics) and Fletcher Hotel (third pic) both in Amsterdam. As part of this project, I’ve been emailing hotels around the world to put together an easy to reference list for people to find hotels with guaranteed doors at BringBackDoors.com And I did notice that in Amsterdam a lot of hotels were saying they don’t have doors. It wasn’t the worst city (that honor goes to Barcelona, so far I’ve only found TWO that have said yes to all doors), but it was still bad. Then I went into the comments. And kept getting people mentioning these hotels in Amsterdam. And I realized that clearly the city has a designer or architect on the loose who has a thing for test tubes. It’s horrible. Luckily, I was able to find 6 hotels in Amsterdam that all have bathroom doors in every room and have them all listed on BringBackDoors.com These hotels were submitted by so many people I couldn’t name them all. But to submit your own bad hotel bathroom send me a DM with hotel photo, name, and location! #hotel#bathroom#hoteldesignfail Bathroom doors | hotel bathrooms | hotel privacy | no privacy | travel problems | hotel issues | travel | hotel design | hotel design fail | hotel designers | design fail | hotel concept | bathrooms | Citizen M | Hotel Fletcher | Hotels in Amsterdam | Visit Amsterdam | Amsterdam
A great way to save a buck—er, I mean, ‘create a modern look’
As many commenters asked, why do hotels have glass doors — or, worse, no doors at all—in their bathrooms? Well, this has been a growing trend in modern hotels over the past decade as a means to create a sleek aesthetic and to allow glass partitions to bring more daylight into otherwise darker sections of the room.
At least that’s what’s being promoted to the customer. In reality, skimping on solid doors for glass ones or none at all gives the illusion that the room is bigger than it is while requiring fewer building materials. It does bring in more daylight, but mostly with the hope that you’ll cut down on electricity use for lights in an otherwise enclosed space. These reasons are also why some hotels don’t have solid walls around their bathroom areas at all.
Tired of the lack of privacy? Check out the database
To combat this trend, Sadie has developed a database at bringbackdoors.com for her and her followers to report which hotels have true, solid, private bathrooms in their accommodations and which ones do not, so people can properly plan where to stay and have true privacy during their most vulnerable moments.
“I get it, you can save on material costs and make the room feel bigger, but what about my dignity?,” Sadie wrote on her website. “I can’t save that, when you don’t include a bathroom door.”
Over time, the hope is that sanity and dignity can be restored as hotels realize that their glass “features” don’t have any real benefit when they don’t allow basic privacy.
A camera developed at MIT can photograph a trillion frames per second. Compare that with a traditional movie camera which takes a mere 24. This new advancement in photographic technology has given scientists the ability to photograph the movement of the fastest thing in the Universe, light. In the video below, you’ll see experimental footage of light photons traveling 600-million-miles-per-hour through water.
The actual event occurred in a nano second, but the camera has the ability to slow it down to twenty seconds. For some perspective, according to New York Times writer, John Markoff, “If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.”
It’s impossible to directly record light so the camera takes millions of scans to recreate each image. The process has been called femto-photography and according to Andrea Velten, a researcher involved with the project, “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera.”
It’s super easy for most people to get hung up on the number on their scales and not how they actually look or, most importantly, feel. People often go on diets in hopes of reaching an ideal weight they had when they graduated high school or got married, but they’re often disappointed when they can’t attain it.
But a set of photos by fitness blogger Kelsey Wells is a great reminder for everyone to put their scales back in storage. Welles is best known as the voice and body behind My Sweat Life, a blog she started after gaining weight during pregnancy. To lose the weight, she started the Bikini Body Guide (BBG) training program and after 84 weeks she shared three photos on her Instagram account that prove the scale doesn’t matter.
