In pandemic times as these cleaning and hygiene is as important as ever. Throughout history epidemics and pandemics has urged science to discover new links between human behaviour and virus/bacteria which has guided our cleaning practices, physical surroundings and human perceptions of health and disease. The plaque led to understanding quarantine as a means to limit the spreading of disease. Cholera made us rethink water supply and sewages. COVID-19 has already made significant changes to our behaviour in terms of washing hands, not touching surfaces and keeping a social distance. As we recover from the effects of COVID-19 organisations and cities might rethink their cleaning standards to be even more thorough, costly and time consuming in order to meet the assumed expectations and regulations. But how is this done properly? How do we balance health, safety and sometimes irrational human behaviour? How do we prioritise and get most value for our money?
Cleaning is fundamental human behaviour
The starting point to answer the above questions is to understand that cleaning is a fundamental human behaviour. We have been cleaning forever. It is a basic factor in feeling comfortable where we live, work and sleep, and it is also embedded in social norms and expectations. We clean our homes before guests come over as a gesture telling that they are important to us. In most satisfaction surveys clean or dirty is an important parameter in how customers rate a service, and in experience design cleanliness is a hygiene factor. Working with the Copenhagen Airport we could for example see a clear correlation between clean toilets and the overall customer satisfaction.
A new cleaning paradigm
IS IT A BIRD has over time done a lot of research about cleaning and cleanliness and therefore know, that perceived cleanliness often is based on primarily visual cues. For a study we did for DSB, we have seen cleaning manuals with pictures of ‘dirt’ broken down into different levels of cleanliness in order to clarify what good cleaning is to the janitorial staff. Our old cleaning paradigm was based on the assumption that dirt is something visual and therefore it made sense to measure what you can see, easily document and easily communicate to others. But now it is not the visible dirt that is our main concern – the important “dirt” for all of us now is the dangerous and invisible Corona virus. How will that change the paradigm?
We might not have all the answers about the next cleanliness paradigm yet, but we do know that everybody working with human experience should pay attention to these questions about how our behavior and perceptions of dirt and cleanliness will change.
