99% Invisible - 93- Revolving Doors

Episode Date: November 6, 2013

The story goes like this: Theophilus Van Kannel hated chivalry. There was nothing he despised more than trying to walk in or out of a building, and locking horns with other men in a game of “oh you first, I … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The story goes like this. And keep in mind with all these origin stories, when they sound a little too much like stories, they're probably not completely true, but anyway. The story goes like this. The Ophilis van Canal hated Shivori. There was nothing he despised more than trying to walk in or out of a building and locking horns with some other man in a game of, no you for, no of course you for, no I insist you for, and more than that socially mandated deference to other men, the off-less van canal hated opening doors for women.

And so the off-less van canal, or Theo for short, took a German innovation from 1881, the Tuha-Onel-Ufzuk, or door without draft of air. He made some improvements to the design and in 1888 was awarded an American patent for the improved revolving door. The first one was installed in Times Square in 1899. That's our producer Sam Greenspin. Van Cannell's improved revolving door had three compartments and weather stripping to ensure an energy efficient fit inside the door frame.

His 1888 patent states that quote, it is perfectly noiseless in its operation and effectively prevents the entrance of wind, snow, rain, or dust, either when it is closed or when persons are passing through it. And as a bonus, annihilates any chance of social interaction that one might have while entering or exiting a building.

The motto of Theo Van Cannell's revolving door company was always open, always closed. And so for the past hundred plus years, we have had the solution to keep dust and noise and rain and sleet and snow from entering our buildings. And yet, the likelihood that you will actually use it is very, very low. The problem is that people don't use revolving doors because they're heavy or they feel like they might get stuck in them. Compartment terrify people.

And this shouldn't be a big surprise. When you're approaching a revolving door, it's always hard to tell how hard you're gonna have to push it to get a going. And if it is already moving, gonna have to push it to get a going and if it is already moving You have to time it just right and there's also the anxiety of getting a limb caught or maybe your bag And if oh man if you're walking with someone and talking to them And it's a little bit bigger of a revolving door and you accidentally get in there with them and then you're with them

like really close even for that few seconds and it's just Yeah deep breaths. Deep breaths. Ooh. And if you've read Alan Moore's Watchman, you may remember that detail about how some of the superheroes are wary of capes because one time their caped crusader colleague,

Dollar Bill, got his cape caught in a revolving door and was thus immobilized as a bank robber approached him and shot him in the head point blank. As long as you can tell if you need to push or pull to open the door, and that subject could be a whole episode and of itself, swing indoors are just easy. And most of us, unlike Van Canal, are well-adjusted human beings who actually do try to open the door for each other. Anytime you have a stream of people walking together and the first person in that line opens the swing door,

the rest tend to follow. So this is Andrew Shea. My name is Andrew Shea. I'm a graphic designer, writer, and educator in New York City. Andrew's obsession with revolving doors started when he was in graduate school. I was doing my thesis on designing for social change, and a good friend of mine was visiting. He found out what I was doing, and he pointed to the revolving doors, and he's like,

if he wanted to design for social change, I wish he would get people to use revolving doors more often. That was his challenge to me. Andrew dove into the literature on revolving doors, which was shockingly quite slim. But he did come across a study. A study done by some MIT students. I think they were in the urban planning department, but it was focused on sustainability,

and it was the only resource I could find out there that seemed to have a thorough tate of information about revolving doors and their impact. And I had a lot of math in it. I kind of avoided the math because I didn't know how to interpret it. But you don't really need to see the math to understand the logic. The basic idea of how a revolving door saves energy is that revolving doors never open. They can prevent the free exchange of air from the outside to the inside.

As the people move through the revolving door, they don't open it. The only air that leaks through is either the actual air that's being transported over the people and the chambers of the revolving door, or whatever leaks around the weather stripping. That's Dan Wasalowski. Shoddy. Dan was one of the authors on the revolving door or whatever leaks around the weather stripping. That's Dan Wasolowski. Shoddy. Dan was one of the authors on the revolving door study. Back when he was a grad student at MIT, he worked on a project studying people's behavior with respect to revolving doors and the energy savings associated with using revolving doors

in large buildings. And in some ways, it's a study that will not leave him alone. We were not the first people to contact him for an interview about this. I don't understand it. You know, I've got like 20 peer reviewed publications and material science and engineering. And what do I have like constant contact about it? A term paper I did eight years ago. Anyway, Dan did a bunch of science that sounds like this. Leighton heat associated with all the water vapor that is in that material. We didn't really give you enough context to understand that a little bit, but here's the

result. There's eight times more air exchanged when you use the swing door than when you use the revolving door. Or put another way. Revolving door is exchanged eight times less air than swinging doors. That's Andrew Shea again, the designer in New York, and this factoid really resonated with him. Which makes total sense, because opening a swinging door is like tearing a hole in a York. And this factoid really resonated with him. Which makes total sense because opening a swinging door is like daring a hole in a building. All that heat or air conditioning leaks out and the building has to kick in the high gear to make up for the temperature and humidity fluctuation. Dan Wasolowski and his team observed a building on the MIT campus that had both revolving doors and swinging doors, and found that the revolving door usage sat at about 25%.

The team realized that in addition to conserving energy and helping the environment, they could also save MIT more than $7,500 annually if everyone just used the revolving door in this one building. And they found they could raise revolving door usage at that building to 60 or 70% with just some simple signage. And even though the MIT study was done in Boston and Andrew was in New York, it seemed like a pretty transposable data set. So all this inspired Andrew Shay in New York City.

He decided to take up his friend's challenge back from when he was in grad school and see what some simple observation and signage could do for one building in New York. That building was at Columbia University. It was the applied sciences building, it's a brand new building. There's three sets of swinging doors and three sets of revolving doors at the one entry point of this building.

Andrew started by just watching the building. I spent probably altogether about two months, once a week, I think it was Tuesday mornings. Some of those weeks I was there for twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I watched people exiting and entering the building and counted the number of people. And he counted for about 20 hours in a two month period. I discovered that only 28% of people were using the revolving doors.

So my first intervention was just to create a very basic sign. I took an eight and a half by eleven piece of paper. I wrote, really simply, please use revolving doors. He added that fact to it about revolving doors exchanging eight times less air than swinging doors. It was very crudely taped onto the swinging door. It caused 58% of people to then go ahead and use revolving doors. So that's a 30 point increase. It was a 30% increase, yep. And of course, I wanted to know how I could get that number even higher. Andrew made a second sign in the shape of an arrow. And this arrow was smaller than the first sign. But then revolving door usage actually fell five points from his previous attempt to 53%. So Andrew tweaked it, made it larger, and he also made it match Columbia University's

visual identity. Columbia has like a light blue and a dark blue color palette in their branding system. So my hope was that the branding would help people connect with it more and take it more seriously. And in fact, 71% of people ended up using the revolving doors as a result of that. 71% that's up 43 points from where he started at 28%. Here at 99pi HQ, we were curious to find out if that could happen here in the Bay Area. So I went with our intern, Avery Truffleman, to go stake out a building in downtown Oakland.

This is Avery and Sam in the observation stage. The vestigial scientist part of me has to remind you here that all the data sets we're talking about today are very small, so understand that. But everyone's observations are aligned. Given the choice, revolving doors just aren't that popular. So it's been two minutes in our experiment so far, how are we doing? We've got 12 for swinging 0 for revolving. It's best to say nobody is using their revolving doors.

And when someone did use a revolving door, it was notable. Okay, market 1 revolving door. Wow, what a charm. I don't think it's normal. Oh my wait. After a half hour they tallied up the results. Right, tallied up. How do we do? 259 people use swinging doors.

Four people use revolving doors in a 30 minute period. Okay, so... So, yeah, let's type up these signs. These are the signs designed by Andrew Shea. It's an arrow that says, please use revolving door. They exchange eight times less air. You know, just the people are using the revolving doors where we're exactly. Alright, all the signs are out.

Alright, let's see what happens. That one's on the side. And uses the revolving door. Followed by another guy. Followed by another guy using the revolving door. This lady is even waiting for the revolving door to finish so she can get in and go the other direction. They're already increasing the revolving door traffic

flow. It doubled in less than five minutes. And after another 30 minutes, team 99 PI tell you the results. One for revolving. Four, three, two, three. All right. All right.

How we do? OK. OK. So these are people who use the swinging doors, even though the sign was on them. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 45, 150, 155, 157. And then people who use the revolving doors this time are 5, 10, 15, 20, 20, 65, 69. So with no sign, this building between the hours of 12, 30 and 1 on a Monday, originally it was 1.5 percent. After the sign...

30 and a half percent of people went through the revolving doors when there was a sign pointing to them as opposed to 1.5 percent without the signs. So, not too shabby, yeah. Now we did not try testing all the variations, so people could have interpreted the signs as intended, taking in the message that revolving doors were more energy efficient, and adjusted their behavior accordingly. Or they could have just thought the swinging door was out of order, or they could have just noticed something was out of the ordinary, and it nudged them into using the revolving door.

Whatever happened, this much is clear. Putting up an arrow on a door makes people do things, and if you want to get people to use a revolving door, that's a good place to start. And with that, Sam and Avery left the lobby of that building and took down the science. Just like Andrew Shea took down his science at Columbia and shared his results with the powers that be, but nothing ever came of it. Dan Wasolowski says that MIT did eventually incorporate some of the basic concepts of his study when they created sustainability stickers to place on their outer doors, although he thought his signs were better.

But another really powerful way to increase the use of revolving doors is to address the issue in the architecture itself. It turns out there are actually much more effective revolving doors out there, like at the Marietta Hotel in Oakland. It turns out there are actually much more effective revolving doors out there, like at the Mariette Hotel in Oakland. It's much larger, it's the visual focus of the entrance, and it has three dividers which are actually big enough for you to be inside one of them with the stranger, and not feel too weird about it.

And they revolve automatically. And perhaps most importantly, the dormant won't open the swinging doors for you unless they see you're already going for them. So if you can't get institutional buy-inin or get a brand new gigantic revolving door, Andrew Shea has a revolving door action kit that you can download for free. Take to your local office building. Scotch tape not included. It's B-Y-O-S-T. FYI. Y-M-M-V. I see Y-V. BRB.

Oh, MGA. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan, Avery, Truffleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7. Local Public Radio K-W and San Francisco in the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story,

including cool pictures and links, and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible. You must go to 99ipi.org. [♪ BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING, BELL, BELL RINGING, BELL RINGING,