JO-ANNE BICHARD
I've always seen public toilets to be dirty, unkept places that I use to eliminate my own waste. I don't particularly view them as bastions of privacy. Instead, I tend to see them as filthy spaces for hard drug use and as a sheltered refuge for the homeless during the winter months.
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Jo-Anne Bichard made known to me some ideas contextualized in modern public toilet use. Firstly, that it is one of the last public spaces separated by gender. Secondly, that it is one of the rare public spaces where you can be alone. Thirdly, as a man, I have been ignorant of the public toilet needs of women.
Thinking about toilets as areas of segregation between men and women, it feels as if this should have been resolved a long time ago. As a society that prides itself on understanding basic human rights, it feels backward that men and women have to be separated at the one definite thing they share. We clearly aren't, but it feels as if we should have surpassed this hurdle a long time ago.
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The necessity of privacy whilst out in public is very important to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. A public toilet, in theory, allows for necessary privacy. This issue develops into what is public and what is private? There is a lot of publicly accessible loos that aren't maintained by the taxpayer - instead, they are owned by private companies. This gives a mandate and allows the individual companies to dictate entry to certain groups of people as opposed to the general public. However, access to a toilet - is access to a toilet, so people have created maps that show where the nearest public or publicly accessible toilet is.
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As we are still gender-segregated in terms of toilet use, we have to address the issues that surround the absence of women's toilets. While men can prop a leg up and find any semi-concealed cubby when nature calls at an inopportune moment, women don't have that kind of accessibility.
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We are at our most vulnerable when we are doing our business, so making sure that we feel safe whilst doing it is incredibly important. Bichard talks about the exclusion that gender-neutral lavatories produce. Instead, Bichard proposes that a toilet design based on the needs of the users instead of their genders. And I have to agree with this. It's not just male or female, it's male with and without disabilities and female with and without disabilities. We have to learn to create ultra-accessible spaces where someone can exercise a basic human right.
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Bichard shared with us a news report about 'transparent toilets' in Tokyo. This is why I think it would solve a lot of problems:
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a) It deters people from leaving the room looking like a mess.
b) It is regularly maintained, creating jobs and promoting hygiene.
c) The room is laid out for maximum space - with plenty of room to move around inside.
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NORTHERN IRELAND
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Bichard researched rising suicide rates in an area of Londonderry/ Derry surrounding the river Foyle in Northern Ireland.
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She spoke about the nature of the bridges joining the two sides as being hot spots for suicide. I can understand a bridge being, for lack of a better term, attractive to someone that might want to kill themself, especially if it is very tall. The height of the bridge will not change, it is necessary for it to be tall for cargo and craneage operations to function. What can change is the bridge itself.
Redesigning the bridge's aesthetics changes how people interact with the bridge as well as how they see the bridge. Bichard found an issue with the current way of combating suicide. If I'm not taking this completely out of context, she found that having signposts or stickers asking people not to jump, could influence someone that wasn't necessarily thinking about jumping off the bridge, to jump off the bridge. I have to agree, sometimes the best way to deal with the worst-case scenario is not to talk about the worst-case scenario. Instead, we should do everything we can to avoid the worst-case scenario. Just to be clear, I am still unsure as to what the worst-case scenario is - suicide or thinking about suicide. Once someone starts to contemplate it seriously, it becomes very hard to pull them away from the edge.
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I think Bichard is trying to find a way to redesign, not just the architecture, but the perception of the spaces around it. She is trying to remove the idea that Northern Ireland's River Styx runs through Londonderry.
Vizrage's compositions of digital artworks imposed over landscape images of Londonderry, not only act as mock-ups of what a place might like post-reconstruction, but they provide a description of how people will act in those places.