a design problem

The traditional toilet is a classic of design functionality. Design tutors the world over have doubtless spent many a happy moment expounding the simplicity of its design while at the same time marveling at its embodiment of the Bauhaus principle of form following function. Indeed, Walter Gropius is rumoured to have included prunes with every meal during his later years, not only to aid his peristaltic action but also to give him reason to visit one of the true monuments to his life's teachings: the toilet bowl. It cannot be emphasised enough that if you had designed the classic toilet potty you could have retired there and then, content that you had reached the zenith of your intellectual and creative abilities and would never have to worry about earning money again.

And then someone had to go and mention that we use too much water when we flush the toilet.

Now, call me a cynic if you like but we live on an island that has been deluged by floods these past few years. The Saudis can extract water from the sea, desalinate it and drink it without any problem. We, a so called advanced country, leaders of the Industrial Revolution, surrounded by water and besieged by Biblical rains 10 months of the year, can only do what we are becoming world famous for and create an inferior version of something that already performed faultlessly. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the modern water saving toilet.

On the face of it, the water saving toilet is an improvement on the classic design. It serves the same function but spares the Earth's most abundant resource. But is it really an improvement? Let us consider another simple and timeless piece of design: the snooker table. What could be simpler? A flat surface, 6 pockets for the balls to fall down. Marvelous. Imagine if someone decided to improve the humble snooker table by redesigning the pockets. Now, instead of the ball dropping down into the pocket and disappearing, the ball drops onto a small shelf where it sits until you manually remove it or poke it into the hole with a brush. Imagine further, if you will, that snooker balls have a soft brown outer coating and that the shelf that they land upon in this 'new and improved' snooker table is made of white porcelain. Suddenly the act of potting the brown has resulted in you having to perform two further operations: removing it from the shelf and cleaning up any residue it almost certainly left behind.

Now come with me if you will to a world beneath the sea. Here you will never see fish swimming up to the underwater flora and sniffing it. There are two reasons for this: fish don't have nostrils and you can't smell anything under water. That's right, you can't smell anything. However foul. Deposit it beneath water and you are spared the olfactory distress. This was another feature of the classic toilet design. Pretty much 99% of deposits ended up beneath the water line. Introduce a stopping off point on this journey to the North Sea and you lose this benefit.

I trust nobody needs pictures to understand these design flaws...