Gym Showers

A product that I have encountered many times is the horribly flawed gym shower. It is most likely one of the worst designed products of the many that one finds in public schools. I assume its purposed must only be to make teen boys and girls have horrible hygiene, feel self conscious, and save as much water as possible. The gym shower at my middle and high schools were a series of long shower heads on both sides. In order to turn on the shower a student had to run in avoiding the spray of all the other showers, find a shower that function well and push the button in the middle to turn it on. They would then be hit with a powerful burst of freezing cold water. There was no space to put a towel or to place your own soap and shampoo. Teens would often come up with different theories on how to get warm water. Some claimed that twisting the knob would do it, others that it could be achieved only by pressing the button multiple times or leaving it on for several cycles before using it. In any case the cycle lasted approximately 15 seconds, so unless you were the worlds fastest showerer you had to press the button multiple times, as you attempted to get soap out of the impossible dispensers, in order to take a normal shower. The design is flawed in several ways: the mapping and feedback are horrible. It is impossible to determine if you have achieved warm water by some miracle of god, or by actually pressing some part of the shower. Users did not know which way to turn knobs, or how to effect water temperature change. The design failed to consider the needs of the user, there was no privacy, no place to set belongings, and no way to get soap. It failed to meet the users needs and often through the errors in achieving proper water temperature more water was wasted than saved through the "automatic shut off" every 15 seconds. People often repeatably pressed the button without even getting in, just to try and get warmer water. The end result of this horrible design was that many kids often chose to skip showers, and go through the day sweaty, rather than face the perils of cold water, frequent shut off, and little or no soap.