Celebrate World Toilet Day

Meet Mr. Toilet from Focus Forward Films was featured in the Design Indaba online film festival in 2012.

Things to read on the crapper*:

“We shall deal here with humble things”
The design, culture and politics of the bathroom — and how “this smallest of domestic rooms is linked to the larger worlds of engineering and infrastructure.”

Flies in Urinals: The Value of Design Disruptions
How a disruption in routine (potentially by design) can alter the environment.

The Water Underground
A video from the Center for Urban Pedagogy that tracks the complex — and contested — systems of water supply, treatment and waste that serve New York City.

The Most Beautiful Crapper in the World
In 1772, the Antwerp alderman Adrien van den Bogaert purchased a historic property in the center of the city and then hired architect Engelbert Baets to renovate the place.

Flush with Inequality: Sanitation in South Africa
The complex political, social and environmental meanings of sanitation in post-apartheid South Africa.

Peepoobag
A self-sanitizing, single-use, biodegradable container for human waste.

San+Co
Providing sanitation and electricity in a single venture.

Don’t Flush Me
Prototype for urban system to detect and prevent sewage overflows

The Art of Solid Waste
A slideshow of photographer Paho Mann’s images of post-consumer detritus — a.k.a. trash — part of a new public art project at a solid waste facility in Phoenix, Arizona.

*World Toilet Day is observed annually on November 19th. 2.5 billion people in the world don’t have access to a toilet, even fewer have access to proper sewage treatment. Managing human waste in our ever-increasing world population is one of the major design challenges of urban planners and a topic no one can afford to ignore.