Good Thinking

Pull and Push door concept makes coming and going a lot easier

View 3 Images
The design offers a handle to the "Pull" side and a panel to the "Push" side offering a more intuitive answer (Imaget: Jeon Hwan Soo)
Different panels designs could be used (Image: Jeon Hwan Soo)
The "Push" panel and "Pull" handle both release the door catch when they are flush with the door itself (Image: Jeon Hwan Soo)
The design offers a handle to the "Pull" side and a panel to the "Push" side offering a more intuitive answer (Imaget: Jeon Hwan Soo)
View gallery - 3 images

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 "Push" panel and "Pull" handle both release the door catch when they are flush with the door itself (Image: Jeon Hwan Soo)

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.

Different panels designs could be used (Image: Jeon Hwan Soo)

Via Yanko Design

View gallery - 3 images
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
10 comments
ipsep
is it just me or a lot of these designs that design school put out just don\'t make sense.
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.
Michael Mantion
Finally a product that will allow all people equal access to university..
Gregorymerchant
There is and has been a standard, unofficial, primarily based on human response to design elements. A Horizontal bar denotes push and a vertical bar means pull.
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.
Stuart21
Of course the obvious illustration for this invention would be Larsons \'Midvale School for the Gifted\'
Come back, Gary.
paul_
or just use a double swing door?
Bruce H. Anderson
When using this device to open the door from either side, additional force is placed on the latching mechanism. That presents two problems. The first is friction between the catch and the strike plate, which must be overcome to open the door. The second is the sudden release of the door once the latch has disengaged while the user is pushing/pulling. It seems that this device was not tested on an actual door.
Mark in MI
I think this is not well thought out as ipsep and Bruce have said. The designer didn\'t take into account requirements of the real application. In this case, the large hole in the door makes it unsuitable to fire doors, so it won\'t get anywere in industrial/office/school applications. And push-pull forces will try to bind the mechanism. This claims to be simpler than the school doors mentioned in the article (not proven) but is not as easy and intuitive to use as claimed. People need a handle to grab sometimes. The current push bar systems have been used for decades for a reason.

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.
Terotech
This is a wind-up! It\'s just a one way opening door with a handle on one side, and a push panel on the other, unless the door is powered shut, as IPSEP says, it would be impossible to close from the \'PUSH\' side
Mike Donovan
no doubt one of the doors will be locked and you\'ll break your wrist anyway
Mark in MI
\"no doubt one of the doors will be locked and you\'ll break your wrist anyway\"

Classic!