Bathroom space design has become a popular and rapidly-growing field. In the past, bathroom spaces did not garner this much attention, and users had to make the best of standard spaces of limited size. These days, people expect a bathroom to be a special, total living environment, functional, and comfortable.
Satisfying these expectations can be quite difficult. Paradoxically, the current trend towards more bathrooms than kitchens in homes because of the desires of the occupants make designing functional and user-friendly bathrooms even more difficult. The fact that many of the users are elderly or disabled also adds a need for flexibility and individual fit to the problem. In this article, the knowledge learned from various kinds of research on designing usable and efficient kitchens is used to structure discussion of the topic of designing functional and user-friendly bathrooms.
The bathroom design process is discussed in several sections that focus on the needs of the various user groups, ways to create and organize functional building blocks, and strategies to develop extremely efficient special designs (which tailor a design to a particular user) suitable for each different type of user. In the end, useful details are discussed in the various components of the fitting out. The big challenge of this project is that it will involve millions of people in homes where no professional bathroom designer had any input.
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