In the current day and age of design, you might have imagined we'd have come up with an aesthetic, intuitive and practical answer to the “Push – Pull” dichotomy frustrating and embarrassing confused shoppers and office-workers everywhere. While there are solutions such as the "push bar – pull handle" design often found in schools, student designer Jeon Hwan Soo has come up with a smart and instinctive all-in-one design that could reduce the number of people pulling an arm out of its socket or running into a door when they have pushed when they should have pulled or vice versa.
The problem is that “Push” and “Pull” are often not sufficiently different visually and no standard differentiation has ever been introduced. Schools and emergency exits have been using the “push bar – pull handle” system for years but they aren't as simple as Soo's all-in-one design. Soo, of the Samsung Art and Design Institute, instead proposes a flat panel on the “Push” side that releases the door catch when the panel is pressed flush with the door itself, and a handle on the “Pull” side that releases the catch when the handle panel clicks into flush position with the door. Soo's design also allows for the shape of the push/pull panels to be made in different shapes.
Via Yanko Design
This one I just don\'t get. How do you close the door? If you put it open, you have nothing to pull it close with. if the door is spring loaded, what if the spring break? You can use the side of the door but how to pull it shut? Do you have to slam the door?
If you pull a recessed handle on the push side, you can just creating the same thing that we have today.
Clever designers have managed to to away with the actual bars and instead use the same horizontal and vertical cues in the door design itself.
Any door that has the same handles and look feel on both sides is hardly worth opening at all unless it swings both ways.
Come back, Gary.
If I were an instructor at a design school I would make the students show that they have read the applicable codes and have spoken to people IN the industry they are designing a product for in the student\'s final paper. They need to at least talk about if or why it would be viable based on real information, not like a stand up comedian saying \"don\'t you hate it when...\" Since this does not seem to happen, then why do unvetted design school projects make it as news? Are we the unpaid consultants that are supposed to vet the designs? it should be OK for a sudent to propose a design, then at the conclusion of the project to decide that the design was not feasible. Failure is OK. All this current process does is teach students to promote bad design until it is implemented, then fails later when it should have failed up front.
Classic!