If you cannot reach the top cabinets in your kitchen, if you're tall enough to bang your head on the overhead bins. If you are not a one-size-fits-all person, the problem may not be you but the design. Environments and products are designed to serve people, not the other way around. If there is a problem, it should be fix. As the concept behind the new but defined by design. That takes an in-depth look in many of design problems from classroom seating to public restrooms and offers radical solutions. Training is Kathryn Anthony author of design. In your introduction you right that affects the quality of lives in profound ways. Can you tell us about some of those? The design of the products we use every day in the design of our homes, schools, classrooms and workspaces, the cars, public transit and many other spaces all send us messages about who is important and who's not. Who fits best here and who doesn't. Who is comfortable and who's out, who stated in his needs to ask for help. One of the most common complaints is airplane. Tall, short, plus size, those to work for a lot of people. Echo the first chapter is about how the design of clothing, shoes, how they impact our lives. One of the solutions may be 3-D body scan. People can have their physiological dimensions read by a machine and get close tailor-made for them. Echo there's many different companies who do it and some are mainstream places from other companies that store your information you have and you can look for different vendors who can sell you close that it. That would eliminate all the problems of returning close and shopping from one store to another. Exactly. A big now with people buying their close on the Internet. The returns are very costly for people buying and people selling. In your book, you call the study of design a taboo topic and call for a restroom revolution. It's definitely needed. Anyone who has been to Japan will know what I'm talking about because that country has had a restroom revolution and its fabulous. Very pedestrian only. Here, many of our restrooms are outdated. The typical gender segregation doesn't work for a lot of people. We need more family restrooms, more diaper changing facilities. A lot of times we see it only in the women's. A lot of times where we see the diaper changing facility in either restroom is not well located, it is to be near a sink. People come in with multiple children and may be able to handle -- there are lots of issues. The big one is potty parity. Waiting in lines. One of the places I call out as a positive example are unisex restrooms right here and they replaced the typical male and female restrooms that have fallen into disrepair and are two sets now, one on the north end and one on the south and. Everybody waits or nobody waits. We have a one-size-fits-all design because of cost sometimes. How much would it cost to design things that could be suited for individual needs? That is a big?. Typically, if from the outset the sensitivity to diverse body shapes, ages, types and genders has taken into account from the beginning, it's built in to the process, it doesn't have to cause that much. This microphone is adjustable. I went to a concert the other day and the music stand goes up and down. Something that moves up and down can work for them and without a lot of extra costs. Designed from the outset, it doesn't have to cost much more and it can work at her and make people feel they are welcome. Kathryn Anthony will talk about her book defined by design , she was about that tonight at 7:30 PM.
The cause of long lines for women's public restrooms? Author Kathryn Anthony blames bad design.
In her book, "Defined by Design: The Surprising Power of Hidden Gender, Age, and Body Bias in Everyday Products and Places," Anthony points to the public restrooms at La Jolla Shores as an example of a solution to this problem.
"They're unisex and either everybody waits or nobody waits," Anthony said.
Anthony's book is about the impact of design on our daily lives and gender, age and body biases in places and products.
Anthony joins Midday Edition Tuesday to talk about the problems bad designs create and solutions to those problems.
Anthony is speaking at Warwick's in La Jolla on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
