Having trouble saving water during the morning shower? No problem, Spiky is here, the shower curtain that will literally kick you out of there if you start wasting.
California’s drought is definitely making history. Everybody is pointing fingers at everyone else, yet very few are acting. People keep carelessly watering their gardens, when there are so many ways to do it without wasting the precious resource. Water bottling companies keep tapping into the resources of natural parks, although their actions were clearly exposed. People continue singing in the shower, spending much longer time in there than necessary. The list of offenders is endless.
But we can all do something about saving water, instead of just blaming others. Some time ago, I told you about a group of students, who estimated that if people pee in the shower, they would save 720 million liters of water per year, and that is only in the UK. Now, here is another invention, again coming from EU’s big island, which is again aimed at people wasting water in the bathroom, and again it involves a shower.
Meet the Spiky curtain, a creation by the London-based artist Elisabeth Buecher. Spiky is essentially a ‘smart’ shower curtain, which kicks you out of the shower in just 4 minutes. The curtain is definitely mean, but I guess the designer has said it best – it is a “design for pain and for our own good”.
It works in the following manner. The curtain is comprised of long and quite sharp inflatable spikes (hence the name). Four minutes after you have started the water, the curtain rapidly inflates the spikes, pushing you out of the shower cabin. The spikes are of a perfect size, so that when inflated they take up all the space, literally shoving you out of there.
Spikey, however, is not the only such invention by the creative designer. As part of her project entitled “My shower curtain is a green warrior” presented at 2015 Milan Furniture Fair, Buecher has developed one other curtain called “Trap”. This one is also inflatable, but as the name implies, it traps you in. This one is particularly useful for people with claustrophobia- I reckon they will spend more than 4 minutes under that running water only once after installing the curtain.
Of course, these are quite dramatic solutions. If you are not really up for punishing yourself for spending some extra minutes under running water, you can just invest in a little timer that can guilt you in, or a low-flow shower head. Discipline is key.
Image (c) Elisabeth Buecher
