Pretty soon, offices will be filled with chairs the fit two and three-person keyboards.
I don't even want to think about how the whole "open office" philosophy will influence future restroom design.
I don't even want to think about how the whole "open office" philosophy will influence future restroom design.
I spend a lot of time working out of cafes, both for my job and when I'm working on some personal project. ~4-8 hours a day in a cafe plus a coffee every 90 minutes or so and plenty of water means I have a lot of experience with coffee shop public restrooms. And almost all of them are terribly designed.
The worst problem, common to almost all cafes, is that a place with a capacity of ~40 people or so will have two single-user gendered restrooms. By this I mean there is a label or picture on each door indicating "Male" or "Female". This is a problem for a number of reasons, including that it creates issues for trans and genderqueer people, but also that it inevitably creates situations where there is a queue for one restroom (because of a user who is taking their time, for whatever reason) while the other is empty. Of course, someone could jump out of the queue and use the empty restroom, but there's a social norm that we generally must abide that forbids this.
Another inefficiency is that faucets for washing up tend to be locked in the same single-user room as toilets. This causes backups when a person needs to use the faucet but someone else is using the toilet or vice versa. Plenty of people just pop into a single-user restroom to adjust their hair or wash their hands or whatever.
In something like 9 years of working consistently out of cafes, I've seen just two that have what I consider to be well-designed restroom facilities: the Starbucks at Main & Olympic in Santa Monica, CA, USA and Sightglass Coffee in SoMa, San Franciso, CA, USA. Each have an open, shared sink area with a glut of faucets and two to four single-user toilets behind locked doors opening out into it. I've never seen a line for the restrooms at these cafes, although I don't know if that's because of good design or because no one wants to use such weird restrooms ;-)
http://sf-hrc.org/compliance-guidelines-prohibit-gender-iden...
Here in Southern California, West Hollywood recently passed a similar ordinance that prohibits gendered single-user restrooms in public spaces and businesses.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-weho-gender-neut...