Henry Rose

I’m working from a coffee shop in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood today. Just now I went to the restroom and while I was there I washed my hands and went to dry them.

At this shop they’ve elected to use a paper towel dispenser that incorporates a motion detector to release the towels, presumably to promote a sanitary environment.  I’ve seen these systems several times and generally think it’s a good idea. A simple icon can inform a user that they just need to wave at the machine and it will give them what they want (towels).

However, this particular design dispenses only about a half inch of paper for each pass of your hand in front of the sensor. I assume this decision was to reduce the total amount paper used by the system, a noble cause.  But, in order to dispense even enough paper so that the end of the paper sticks far enough out of the machine for the user to grab it requires 5-6 waves of the hand. And in order to get a sufficiently large piece of paper requires almost twice as many waves.

Could they not have designed the system such that the first wave released 3 inches of paper, and subsequent waves realeased only 1/2 inch?  That would eliminate the frantic hand waving that’s currently required to get a piece of the towel, but also discourage over use of the towels by requiring great effort to get more than the initial 3 inches.

Just a thought.