Opening without hands

Despite the great antiquity of doors – the oldest known doors are illustrated on the walls of Egyptian tombs - there seems to have been remarkably little development in handles to open latches. Earliest Egyptian, Babylonian,Assyrian and Mediaeval door handles were mostly made as rings, which had to be pulled out and turned. Door knobs became popular, we believe, around the end of the eighteenth century. Modern technology has allowed the laden shopper or disabled person to pass through a door without having to operate any doors handles or knobs at all. Sensors detect the oncoming person and machinery opens the door and then closes it again. But such systems are too expensive for the ordinary home and they suffer from the serious limitation that they depend on electric power to operate them, which everyone is doing their best to use less of and which can suddenly cease to be available when it is most needed. The solution adopted in restaurants is to mount the doors on springs, and barge through them backwards, but practice and swift movement is required to avoid the return motion when they close. Most doors have door handles to work latches that secure them closed against draughts. The handles come in many forms. The round ones are the worst to grasp, and can be difficult to turn if wet, even when the user does have a hand free. Long handles can just about be leaned on to open when the hands are full, but have a tendency to get caught in the shopping bags when passing through. And if the user is disabled and in a wheelchair, or a small child, they can be most difficult to reach. The Challenge Our challenge this month is to come up with a better method of opening doors with latches that normally hold them closed. Sensor pads and anything electronic is ruled out on cost, complexity and reliability grounds. It should be operable by a person with hands full of shopping bags or a babe in arms, a small child, or somebody who is fairly badly disabled. The solution offered below solves all these problems and seems to us to be obvious in retrospect. We imagine somebody has invented it before, but we have never seen one. It works well with existing door latching systems, is inherently simple, and should be easy to mass produce. See if you can come up with anything better. Solution The solution to this month's challenge has been invented by Abbas Taheri Pour, who calls it an Ergonomic Swing Door. It was on show at this year's London South Bank University Design Degree Show. His innovation is simply to introduce a pedal near the base of the door, which engages with the door handle mechanism through two linkages. Pressing down the pedal pushes up a connecting rod attached to a linkage engaging with the square shaft that turns the door latch. The conventional handle remains where it is. He says the whole prototype cost him only £220 to make, and his target sale price is £160.