See the doors about to swing both ways

[simont]

When you have an opaque door with a push plate on one side and a pull handle on the other side, I'm always a little nervous when I approach from the pull side: if I'm just reaching out for the handle and someone pushes the door vigorously from the other side, it could hurt my hand, and I rely on my hands a lot. It's likely that my paranoia about this is unnecessarily strong; if so it's due to an incident when I was about thirteen and a kid at school kicked a door incredibly hard from the push side so that it swung through 90 degrees and then shattered the doorstop; nobody's hands were near the pull side at the time, but it always stuck in my mind that they could have been, and that whenever you approach an opaque door there might be a kick-happy rugby player on the other side of it.

Clearly the correct strategy given such a door is always to push it gently if you're on the push side, so that whoever's approaching the pull side has plenty of time to get out of the way, and if you're on the other side to keep your arm loose so that it will just be pushed aside rather than hit painfully if the door suddenly opens. I do both these things conscientiously, but I can't help wondering if there ought to be a better solution involving modifying the door itself to avoid this race condition entirely.

In most cases, the simplest answer is just to put a small window in the door, but that doesn't work when it's the door to (say) a toilet and half the point is that it doesn't have a window in. There must be other options, though. Perhaps if you made the door swing in both directions and put a pull handle on each side, so that simultaneous bilateral access would result in a harmless tug-of-war rather than a painful clobbering? But some people would probably push the door regardless, and I can't think of a cunning mechanism which allows a door to be pulled from both sides but pushed from neither. Alternatively, you could have the door slide open, so that you had to push sideways on the handle, and then simultaneous operation would merely cause it to open twice as fast; but that would require structural cleverness in the wall around the door, and might well turn out to be unacceptably fiddly to implement. I wonder what other simple solutions exist.

Comments

[strongtrousers.livejournal.com]

How about having doors which require a handle to be pushed down to unlatch them, rather than free-swinging. That way you'd get some warning from the handle that someone was coming the other way.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

But people with crutches or with some kind of coordination difficulty would be entirely unable to use the door, which would be a problem if it was a toilet.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I just had an idea. Somebody ought to build an art exhibit where to get in, the doors are all incredibly thin or with complicated handles that you need more hands than you've got to open and unacceptably high up, and there are massive giant steps up to another level - and then there are sane ways of getting into it, but you have to walk all the way around the entire exhibit to get to the first door, then all the way around to get to the second one, then to get to the sane staircase you have to walk all the way round again...and then in the middle there are models of all these incredibly tall thin people with several arms, and a little button with a picture of a normal person and "press for assistance" on it.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The Tate Modern has a room for people like you...

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I always thought the room for people like me in the Tate Modern was the toilets :) they're shiny and black.