Most people have stayed in a hotel at some point in their life and have enjoyed the amenities that come along with the stay. Ensuring personal safety for staff members in the housekeeping department is crucial, especially for female staff members. The Door Jam Company, now known as Anthem Products Group, came to Beyond Design to help them configure and design a product that would keep a door open while hotel staff are inside a room, providing safety, security and a sense of peace. The Prop Lock serves as a simple and effective way to alleviate any risks posed by closed guest room doors.

Researching a Solution

One of the most important aspects of The Prop Lock is ensuring that hotel staff members feel they have enough safety and security while working in a hotel. More often than not, housekeepers are improvising by jamming something into a door to keep it open or just keeping the door closed. The improvisation tends to add wear and tear to the door and door hardware, while also providing an unsafe and unsecure fix. Together with the client, our team set out to identify all the most likely door, hinge and jam configurations – which could possibly be encountered in the daily working life of a hotel housekeeper in order to design the most successful door jam configuration. In addition, ergonomics, ease of use, strength, visual appeal and lessening of the wear and tear on the door hardware were considered while designing The Prop Lock.

Preventing Harm

Designing a product that would prevent trespassers, address guest concerns, avoid uncomfortable situations and enhance operational benefits was the main goal. The challenges of designing and bring a product like this to life was in manufacturing a glass-filled plastic for strength, as well as appeal. In addition, the locks were not designed to be used in a way that we proposed, therefore ceating a solution to packaging the lock to work properly was an interesting process.

Built for Success

The final product, The Prop Lock, is most definitely the only product that we designed at Beyond Design that would specifically work for securing safety and keeping housekeepers and other hotel staff comfortable in their work environment. The concept has enabled hotels to gain an understanding of security for their employees and how it can benefit the industry as a whole. Having The Prop Lock as a standard item in hotels will provide the industry with the tools and resources to prevent any unnecessary incidents from happening. Being proactive from the beginning will help find a win-win solution for all parties in this environment.