The Dyson Airblade is a fabulous hand-dryer. The thoughtful design is beginning to appear in many washrooms around the city. A slick renovation (think granite topped garbage bins) to the ground floor washroom in Robarts includes these dryers. Unfortunately, in this location, women do not use them.
There is a simple explanation. Old-style dryers blow air down onto your hands. The Airblade works differently. You must slip your hands into an opening from above, and then move your hands up and down through the air which blows horizontally. This design means the fixtures must be hung lower than traditional dryers. At Robarts, the Airblades are hung too high for any but the tallest of women to use.
I am 5’6″, not exactly short. To get my hands into the dryer I needed to bend my arms into an awkward position. That said, discomfort is not the primary reason I will never use these particular dryers again. That decision is based on a gross-out factor. The height of the dryer caused the water from my hands to blow up into my face. Being spritzed with water from a dryer in a public washroom was repulsive.
I experienced this in September 2010. I was back in the building recently and returned to the washroom to see if the issue has been rectified. It hasn’t. The dryers are in the same position. I think this is a great case of not following through to see how things are or aren’t working in a space. The fix is easy; lower the dryers. As I observed during my first visit, the women today all ignored the dryers and went straight for the paper towel―once spritzed, twice shy.
