I love living in Morgan. It’s in the center of campus, so everything is accessible by a 3-minute walk. The rooms are cozy and private, with keypads that assure you that no one will enter your room to steal your stuff or disturb you. The basement is comfortable and friendly to work in and to hang out with friends. Morgan is amazing.
Except for one thing that I find truly, truly annoying. This right here:
Maybe I’m being overdramatic, or maybe I’m just being stupid. But either way, this faucet is terrible. Because it does the exact opposite of what it says it would do.
Whenever I get in the shower I’m never sure which way the faucet goes to make the water hotter or colder, although I’ve showered in Morgan for more than a week now. It makes sense that the water turns on if you pull it, as the faucet has the words “PULL ON”. However, the faucet is not very clear on which ways we should turn it to control the temperature.
The arrows on the top of the faucet say that left is hot and right is cold. But does that mean the top of the faucet should go left or the bottom, the longer part of the faucet, should go left? Based on how sink faucets work, it should intuitively be the latter. But no. You actually have to turn the longer bottom part of the faucet to the right so that the shorter top part of the faucet turns to the left. So if the faucet being perpendicular to the floor indicates being warm, the faucet in the picture should be slightly hotter than warm.
It’s a terrible design. The “signifiers” that hints the affordance of controlling temperature is misplaced. The signifiers could either be the arrows, the colored circles on the metal frame of the faucet, or the length of the top and bottom faucets. If the arrows switched places and moved to the bottom of the faucet and the circles switched places, this design would have been great. But everything about this faucet tells Morgan residents the exact opposite of what it actually does.
Every time I enter the shower I have to stop and think about this faucet. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy. Sometimes I think to myself, “Maybe turning the longer part of the faucet to the left actually makes it hot like it says it does.” But alas, I am wrong every time.