HOTEL SHOWER OPERATED BY ONE UNLABELLED DIAL AND FOUR ICONS NOBODY CAN IDENTIFY
Guests are given a chrome cylinder, a pictogram of what may be a butterfly, and the expectation that they will work it out before the water reaches 54°C.
Somewhere in the specification of this bathroom, the word "clutter" was used about the word "HOT."
The control is one dial with no printed range, no colour indication, and no discoverable relationship between rotation and temperature. Beside it, a decal offers four icons. We showed the decal to nineteen people. The highest agreement on any single icon was six of nineteen. Two respondents independently identified the same icon as "a moth in a picture frame."
The design goal here is legible: visual silence. The cost is that a naked stranger in an unfamiliar room must perform an experiment with scalding water as the dependent variable. Legibility is not clutter. A red arc costs nothing and has been solved since roughly the invention of the tap.
We note without comment that the same bathrooms label the shampoo, the conditioner, the body wash, the light switch, and the towel rail.
Evidence & source material
- PHOTOGRAPH
Control and icon decal as installed
Reader submission, three separate properties, same specification.
- MEASUREMENT
Icon identification test, n=19
Best-performing icon identified correctly by 6 of 19 respondents.
Response from the responsible party
No response received. The right of reply remains open indefinitely and any statement will be published here in full, unedited.
Case updates
INQUIRY SENT
Inquiry sent to the fixture specifier named on the escutcheon.
CASE OPENED
Opened at AF 6.2 following twenty-two submissions in eight weeks.
Reader assessment
Reader votes are advisory. They inform the frequency factor; they do not set the score.