We’re not hiding how things work, we’re expressing it" — I sat down with Jake Dyson to talk radical product design, and why your… — TechRadar

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Whether it’s a vacuum cleaner, a hand dryer, an air purifier, or a fan, Dyson products rarely look like anything else on the market — and that’s particularly apparent at the company’s campus in Malmesbury, southwest England, where images of recent launches decorate the walls like modern art. The sprawling complex, in a particularly beautiful patch of Wiltshire countryside, is home to Dyson’s global Research, Design and Development (RDD) center, and the Dyson Institute, where students from around the world study while working alongside engineers on live projects. I visited the center to meet the company’s Chief Engineer Jake Dyson — son of founder Sir James Dyson — and learn more about the company’s approach to design.

Jake Dyson didn’t join his father’s business immediately; instead he set up a workshop and made a name for himself in the world of industrial lighting. Sitting in his office, I asked whether his experience in that sector had contributed to his work at Dyson today.

“Yes, it comes down to identifying problems and solving them,” he explained. “When LEDs first entered the market, I realized people weren’t cooling them properly. The promise of LEDs is that they should last a lifetime, but in reality they were being treated like disposable lightbulbs. I visited Osram in Asia, and they explained that if you keep the diode temperature below about 50C [120F, you can maintain brightness, color quality, and lifespan. That became my goal.

Dyson's unique product designs take center stage at the company's campus in Malmesbury, UK (Image credit: Getty Images / Bloomberg)

“I looked at how satellites manage heat. In space, temperatures swing from extremely hot to extremely cold, so they need precise thermal control. I applied similar thinking by designing systems that passively dissipate heat. For example, the heat moves away from the chip and is cooled by airflow, maintaining a stable temperature even at high power. That process, spotting a problem and solving it, is what drives everything.”

That problem-solving approach has always been the driving force behind the Dyson brand, and explains its unusual portfolio of products; its engineers have never been afraid to venture into new areas when there’s a problem to be solved.

“Sometimes it comes from frustration," said Jake Dyson. "'This product is rubbish, how can we make it better?’ Other times it’s curiosity: ‘Why does this work the way it does?’”

Problem-first design

James Dyson’s book Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure , describes how the problem-first process led to the creation of many of the company’s most iconic and recognizable products — starting with a humble wheelbarrow. Dyson and his wife Deidre were renovating a house in Gloucestershire, England, and wanted to create a garden, but the traditional tools proved frustrating.

“I used a navy barrow in anger and its limitations became increasingly clear,” writes Dyson. “Cement slopped out of it. Its tubular legs sunk into the ground. It was hard to steer. Its sharp edges damaged doorframes. The more I used it, the more I realized that nobody had really thought about these problems or bothered to fix them.”

After much experimentation with shapes, materials, and manufacturing processes, the result was the Ballbarrow: a molded plastic bucket on a steel frame, with the conventional wheel replaced by a pneumatic ball made from EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate). This spread the weight of the load more evenly on soft ground, and was easier to maneuver than a wheel — and in bright orange, it looked unlike anything else at the time.

Dyson products are always designed to solve a problem — the Airblade hand dryer was created to reduce waste from paper towels in public bathrooms (Image credit: Getty Images, Gado)

The product itself was a success, but due to a series of poor business decisions, Dyson senior eventually lost control of the company he had founded around it, Kirk-Dyson, and was ultimately kicked out by the other shareholders.

“I had lost five years of work by not valuing my creation,” he wrote. “I had failed to protect the one thing that was most valuable to me.”

It was a painful experience, but one he learned from as he pressed on with identifying and solving problems — starting with the creation of the first cyclonic vacuum cleaner, which he designed after realizing that dust bags don’t just serve to collect dust — they also act as filters that block airflow, drastically reducing suction power.

“I remembered the same clogging problem on the calico cloth with the powder coating in the Ballbarrow factory and the giant cyclone we had made to solve it,” he wrote. “What if I could develop a much smaller version and replace the clogging bag in a vacuum cleaner?”

Thousands of prototypes later (5,127 to be precise), he had the world’s first bagless vacuum — and a vast collection of patents to protect it.

The Dyson Supersonic was created to solve the problem of heavy and cumbersome hair dryers, with a lighter motor and a center of gravity that sits in your palm (Image credit: Future)

Dyson’s understanding of airflow and cyclonic technology has informed almost all of the company’s subsequent products; but like the vacuum, each one started with a problem. The Dyson Airblade hand dryer was created to reduce waste paper towels; the Airmultiplier fan solved the issue of ‘choppy’ air from conventional fan blades; the Pure Hot+Cool purifier was made to tackle indoor air pollution; and the Supersonic hairdryer solved the problem of heavy and uncomfortable hairdryers with weighty motors.

In every case, the form of the finished product was dictated by the problem it was designed to solve — even if the result looked totally unlike established versions of the device.

“That’s why Dyson products often look unusual; they’re built around their function,” said Jake Dyson in his Malmesbury office. “They’re also beautiful. A hair dryer has a hole through it because of how the airf...

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