If they are PROPERLY designed, this won’t really be an issue. Kohler has some low water toilets that will flow an amazing amount of things that will make you stand back like Neegan and exclaim, “Taking it like a champ!” But yes, especially the earlier ones, did a piss poor job of solid waste removal.
E M Forster described us as “pinko-grey” but I guess no real alt-right person would live with that description for a microsecond.
2 Likes
I see what you did there…
3 Likes
Well when they work I really like the idea of automatic faucets in bathrooms. Because the problem with knobs, as I pointed out to a coworker “I’m not happy when the last thing I touch after I’ve washed my hands is the first think somebody else has touched before they wash their hands.”
2 Likes
It’s possible to design a machine based on ones own racism. It’s also possible to design a machine that incorporates ones own subconscious biases,
Of course it is.
I just don’t think it’s very probable that this particular example was intentional:
“Screw you, Black & Brown people! Stay dirty; no soap for you!”
3 Likes
I had shirts that wouldn’t activate the urinal sensor at work. Usually blue, as I recall.
that’s Smurfism.
With no disrespect, your post appeared sarcastic more than a quest for info. Never a good idea to assume people will understand indirect references…much better had you added something like “I genuinely do not know how these work and this is what I found when I looked it up. Is this information wrong?”
Total clarity is always a good idea and in the current environment, people are going to be rightfully a bit touchy about things even if they misconstrue the intent…
3 Likes
I’d bet heavily whoever designed it is probably mortified and in the future will think about skin tone if they are using any kind of visual sensor. I’m not going to judge the designer, instead I’m going to say that I think almost any white person could have been that designer. We need to do more to make sure we don’t assume the default person is white - it’s something white people do all the time even though we’ve had plenty of chance to learn better. We’re not all a bunch of monsters, we’re just stupid (everyone is stupid, this is just a peculiarly white way of being stupid).
6 Likes
See, the problem when developing a product or application like this is that it has to go through testing to determine that it does what it set out to do. The fact that it was sold as a working product but fails under a very specific case means that it passed the tests it was put through. I t did not have the opportunity to fail the conditions it was not tested under, otherwise it would have been fixed.
I only state the obvious to show that no one needed to go out of their way to deliver a product that fails dark skinned people, all they had to do was define conditions of success that do not take them into account.
6 Likes
Yeah. Seriously, I don’t understand why they keep putting unreliable, calibration-required (that they rarely get) IR-based sensors in when it’d be cheaper and nearly 100% successful on the first try to just do pedal sinks.
Seriously. Pedal sinks rock, you have to actively work to jam them on, and are hands free.
3 Likes
These things seem like they never get calibrated besides QA testing in the factory. I’m betting that these devices are just looking at the wrong frequency or have a much too high activation threshold.
And also, even if they are calibrated, if you calibrate on one skin type, then that’s all the sensor will trip on. It needs to be calibrated for the whole gamut of skin types. Default settings like this happen because the designers conflate “white” with “normal.”
1 Like
and racist against whom? dark skin people for not giving them soap, or light skin people for considering them the only ones dirty enough to need soap? \s 
I agree that it was this. I don’t think it was intentional, but i do think that the creator only tested within their familiar parameters, light skinned hands, rather then a sampling of hands from a wide range of races, ages, genders, etc.
an IR device wouldn’t dispense to a person with an artificial hand. a lot of the work for disabled people faces similar unintended yet unconscious biases. 1 step might not seem like much to an abled walker, but to someone in a wheelchair it can be a block they can not cross.
we need to teach confronting hidden biases in design schools and test designs outside of our presumed use cases and familiar comfort zones.
7 Likes
Racist Soap Dispenser.
Isn’t that Trump?
He’s like the opposite of soap. The more you use, the more scummy you get
7 Likes
Racist Shit Catapult?
3 Likes
Or for people with narrow wrists.
Ooooh that’s a deep cut, and I loved it.
1 Like
When you stopped paying attention to popular culture a decade or more ago, all your cuts are deep 
1 Like
