Oh, come off it. The thing in that photograph? It doesn’t look in the least bit like a urinal. It more strongly resembles a bathtub. The urinals I’ve seen all are flush against a wall, with a tall ceramic rear portion and an elevated basin at the bottom, and typically a puck of blue sani-flush type stuff in each. Even the self-flushing variety look very different from that mop sink, which is not elevated and has no back, not to mention is down in a corner rather than up on a wall.

Many of your archtypal examples fall into this uncanny valley; the bench semi-signals sit down, take a rest, but while also announcing: just don’t get too comfortable.

A far more elegant design without changing the dimensions of the steps would be to use surfaces that emphasise the horizontality of the design and if necessary, the edges of the steps themselves. Regular rows of rectangular paving parallel to the steps would achieve this, possibly with a change of tone, texture or material at the edges. The steps would be self-evident and legible without resorting to non-integral artifice.

The problem was there was a largish, empty room preceding the gents proper (only accessible via a door behind a sight screen, near the entrance). So, as a newcomer you really had to employ a wall following algorithm to discover this obscured secondary room, because it wasn’t obvious.

If convention trains people to expect that a large room behind a door marked ‘men’ will be the room expected, then if it isn’t you need pretty good signage to say “No, this is just a large anteroom for man-to-man chatting when large functions are on. The loo proper is in the room via the door behind you, next to the door you came in by – admittedly obscured by a white screen, in this loo-like room with an inviting flower trough in front of you by the window.”

As for mop sinks, it probably doesn’t need pointing out how confusing bidets sometimes are to cultures that don’t have them.

On the converse, I was once amused when in a DIY store in the bathroom zone a young girl sat on a loo and got to work, wondering why her older sibling was giggling so much.

There are some things whose design or use is conventional and is expected to be understood by convention (needing no explanation). Similarly there are resulting conventions that for a particular use one should expect a particular design, and given a particular design one should expect a particular use.

When these conventions are broken, or people are ignorant of them, misuse or confusion must be expected (unless remedial instruction is provided).

I’ve often been amused when travelling on old railway carriages, that removed interior handles on doors for ‘safety’, when passengers unfamiliar with this new convention had to rapidly work it out (open window, stick hand out to use exterior handle) in a few seconds before the train set off again. Small signs then affixed saying “To open door, lower window” didn’t always help (probably noted subsequently – or pointed out at the time by RTFM wags).

Designers who remove handles, taps, buttons, levers, (or introduce them when they are conventionally absent) can cause a lot of grief for those transitioning between conventions – and quite unnecessarily if the new convention isn’t made obvious, or worse still, the new design is short lived.

Hopefully short-lived like movement sensitive lights in toilets – that are unfortunately not triggered by the movements of those sat in stalls, soon sat in darkness.