Is Count Binface’s pledge against a hand-dryer over a urinal more than just a joke?
In a political landscape currently dominated by interminable and tedious culture wars, it’s taken an intergalactic space lord to address a real issue facing the British public: awful interior UX. Count Binface’s enduring pledges to move badly sited hand dryers – most recently citing the Great Himalayas restaurant in Southport where the dryer is almost directly above a urinal (think about the consequences!) – are constantly laughed off as a novelty manifesto point. Yet for anyone who works in spatial design, architecture, or user experience we all know that the Count isn’t joking. In fact, he’s the only candidate talking about the built environment.
Let’s analyse the Southport scenario from a purely ergonomic standpoint – here’s what the bathroom looks like, according to a social media post we found:
Placing a high-velocity hot-air dryer almost directly above a urinal creates a catastrophic failure of spatial flow. A user attempting to dry their hands inadvertently occupies a sanitation station. Furthermore, anybody who uses the urinal risks triggering the motion sensor, resulting in a confusing, warm breeze just as the flow starts.
It’s a masterclass in hostile architecture, born not of malice but simple yet profound spatial ignorance.
Why does this keep happening?
It’s easy to laugh at a bin-headed satirist taking up the cause of interior design through the means of badly sited hand dryers, but his campaign points to a very visible symptom of a much larger, systemic disease. We are stripping design thinking out of our schools. How can we expect the next generation of planners, venue owners, contractors and, of course, politicians, to understand spatial empathy when Design and Technology (D&T) education is in freefall? According to the Design Council, D&T GCSE entries in England fell by 67% between 2011 and 2023. In 2009, 44% of students took this subject, whereas today it’s just 13%.
When we fail to teach basic design principles of problem solving, ergonomics, and human centred thinking, we don’t just lose future product designers and architects. We end up with a built environment cobbled together by people who think putting a hand dryer over a urinal is an efficient use of wall space. Good design is supposed to be invisible. Bad design tries to blow urine onto your pants when you’re trying to pee.