Bad Designs on Campus - Submission
When Opening a Door Requires a hsuP
Problem description: How do you open a door that says “HSUP”? I pondered this riddle my very first day on the University of Michigan campus. In the sample submission from 2007, the student lauded the west entrance of the EECS building for having PUSH signs on the inside of its ambiguously symmetric doors. Such signs are indeed useful and I’ve illustrated them in the figure at left. Unfortunately, the individual letters are clearly visible from the other side of the glass door, as you can see in the figure at right, and they don’t spell PULL. I solved the riddle as I approached the doors my first day, but even now that I’m a regular user of that EECS entrance, the signs still leave me feeling unsettled.
Proposed solution: Potential solutions, like the problem itself, are very simple. A rudimentary solution might be to stick a PULL sign that isn’t transparent on the outside of each door. It could be placed so as to block the view of the HSUP. A superior alternative would be to replace the current PUSH signs with equivalent signs that are not transparent. If it turns out that the bright afternoon lighting at that entrance makes any PUSH sign transparent, then a more subtle alternative could be sought. For instance, a colored sticker placed directly onto the right side of each push bar would suffice. More importantly, this type of PUSH sign should be avoided on other glass doors around campus that still need signs, such as the doors to Pierpont Commons described in the 2007 sample.