ABSTRACT
The men’s toilets at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, and above all their cleaners, were having a rough time: users were leaving them in a disgusting state. Signs asking the ‘gents’ to take care and ‘aim straight’ had little effect. Punishing untidy behaviour was of course no option. What to do? According to Aad Keiboom, head of development at Schiphol Airport, around 20 years ago maintenance employee Jos van Bedoff came up with the idea to give men a target to aim for. During his military service he noticed someone had drawn small red dots in one of the urinals. This led to less waste from ‘spillage’ than at the other urinals. So the airport decided to take advantage of men’s seemingly automatic inclination to aim at a target and installed urinals with an image of a fly fired into the porcelain. According to Aad Keiboom, the trick reduced spillage by 80 per cent – a big improvement for a site with more than four hundred urinals. And Schiphol Airport made international headlines with this successful attempt to influence behaviour.
