Physics and Safety
Today is pretty soft on work, so I had a chance to think over and diagram something about this office’s setup that has been bugging me for a long while.
We have a big spiral staircase that winds up the middle of the building. This staircase is right-handed in the physics/mathematics sense, meaning when viewed downward from the roof of the building, people ascending the staircase would appear to be traveling counter-clockwise.
This is fine for Great Britain, but in a right-side driving country this means people ascending the stairs take the outside segment of the spiral. Since spiral staircases have an inevitably fan-shaped pattern to the stairs, people walking up the stairs have much better footing (wider footfalls) than those descending.
I think walking down a staircase is a lot more dangerous than walking up, since falling forward is a particularly bad thing when descending.
This should really be considered when designing buildings. Just like you don’t really think of which way you’re winding down one of those helix-shaped parking garage ramps, people really wouldn’t notice which way their rotation vector is pointing. They might just subtly notice it feels more secure when they’re going down the stairs.