“The bathrooms in the LCC Design Block really don’t help.”
“I don’t feel comfortable using a sink in a shared space with extremely bloody hands.“
(Free text responses from my survey ‘Menstruation in Academia’)
One of the themes that stood out in the free text replies I got through my survey were the toilet facilities at LCC. They received 18 mentions most of which highlight how they are not designed for people who menstruate. This has been supported by the many conversations I’ve had about my topic – the toilets always seem to come up.
A key complaint was that most female toilets at LCC don’t have sinks in the cubicles, therefore one potentially needs to walk past other people before getting to the sink and be able to wash one’s bloody hands.
I like to be very visual with my research, so in response to the survey data I spent the morning of the 6th December 2021 at LCC going through the female toilets and taking pictures of them.
I focussed on the toilets that the students and staff on BA Graphic & Media Design would most likely frequent based on their classrooms and the locations of the technical workshops and canteen.
I’m sure I missed some other relevant bathrooms (like the one in the typo cafe) and it’s certainly also up to individual preference and how far someone is willing to walk within the building to have a ‘pleasant’ experience on the toilet.
After the data collection I edited and arranged the photographs into maps representing the relative location of the bathrooms to one another. This way I could make sense of the images with relation to distances one might have to travel from one part of the uni to a specific bathroom location. It also showed the changing bathroom landscape based on location within the building.
“Mapping, the systematic organisation of complex information in a form which may be transported and reinterpreted, is an activity that has much in common with graphic design – the collecting, editing and re-presentation of information in a communicable visual form might be defined as the very core of the discipline”
Noble and Bestley, 2004, p.72
