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Let's All Do Better: A Golf Club You Pee Into

The UroClub is still a benchmark for BS design

By Kat Bauman - October 5, 2016

in Sports | Design Business

Want a reminder that simple, beautiful, problem-solving design changes the world? Well, too bad. Instead, look at this golf club that's also a portable urinal.

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Sometimes I research old TV advertised products to learn about unexpected consumer "needs" I've never considered. When there's-got-to-be-a-better-way there's a fifty-fifty chance I've got no idea what the problem is. The UroClub falls in the "???" column, and because I'm not a penis-sporting golf lover I guess I missed its debut. In sum, it's a golf club the length of a seven iron with a .5 liter hollow handle, a screw off cap, and an entirely un-ergonomic opening for guy golfers to carefully aim at when the clubhouse is catastrophically far away.

You've got a golf cart and I can see the clubhouse behind you, you liar

If the idea of peeing into the hollow handle of a golf club on the middle of the green doesn't sound terribly low key, don't worry! The UroClub comes with a clip-on "privacy towel" in totally covert forest green. It does a 0% job at distracting onlookers from your Chinoed groin, but it does show off that you're too successful and self-confident to even bother looking for a bush.

And if you're grossed out by the idea of transporting a sloshily loaded club for the rest of the day, well, that's what the Help is for.

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Consider its use, its transportation, its cleaning, and then consider that its designer is going to make more money than anyone in your ID school graduating class, because it was definitely invented by someone wealthy enough to spend time de-hydrating themselves on golf courses in the first place. Seriously: a Floridian urologist created this.

So relatable

Golfers aren't known to tolerate discomfort, so he's really locked in on something. Just don't mix it up with this.

o

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Mike Heck

8 years ago

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I've never been to a golf course yet where the male players (of all ages) didn't just walk a few feet into the woods to take care of business.
No fuss, just a perfectly normal body function, then back to the golf. Most of the time it doesn't even interrupt the conversation they are having.

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Dee An

8 years ago

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Update: According to Wikipedia, Go-girl was 'based on a 20 year old design by a doctor', so the student's work I saw wasn't unprecedented.
The problem is real: I've worked in a pub where there so few toilets for ladies that on one busy night some women went against the urinals in the gents.

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Dee An

8 years ago

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Re Go-Girl
I was studying PD between 1998-2001 when we received a brochure of final year student's work from another university - can't remember which, Southampton possibly. It included a Go-girl style device, designed by a female student for use at music festivals. I remember she had a great grin in her photo :)

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Dee An

8 years ago

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>"Given that you'll have a whole golf bag to hand, why not just keep a single-purpose pee bottle in there"
Two possible reasons:
-Stability, possibly. I don't have any issue holding a half-kilogram bottle for thirty seconds, but older gentlemen might.
-Discretion. Making the bottle look like a club gives the impression to distant bystanders that the user is about to make a shot.
Please note, I'm not passing judgement on this product, but just attempting to flesh out the problem a bit more.
It does seem to be a problem better solved through landscape design - create soakaways in the golf course and plant shrubs in a C-shaped plan over them

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Bobtato Smith

8 years ago

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It's pretty obvious this is aimed at older men with prostates the size and consistency of a tennis ball, so I don't want to mock their affliction and I'll assume they do need something to pee into. But what seems insane about this is that it's built into a golf club. Given that you'll have a whole golf bag to hand, why not just keep a single-purpose pee bottle in there, and then use the clubs you actually want to use, with the added bonus that you don't have your own filth audibly sloshing around while you play.

I can only imagine this design is meant to be undetectably stealthy (nope), or to explicitly discourage people from borrowing your clubs.

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Design Breathing

8 years ago

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You go-girl.com

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Eric Ludlum

8 years ago

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There is some real art here. The lead image looks like a classic Hipgnosis cover... http://www.hipgnosiscovers.com/

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