Dryr
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An explorative side project to design a hair dryer. The core idea is to focus on the essentials and distill them down to a simple, yet powerful design.
Background
Some time ago, I noticed that my hair dryer was bugging me. I wasn’t fond of the design and thought it was too complex so I wanted to create my own. Which got me thinking about what is essential for a hair dryer — apparently not the ‘e'.
What is essential for a dryer?
To achieve a design that consists only of what’s truly necessary, I first needed to clarify what the fundamentals are. Focusing on the fundamentals only results in a simple, yet elegant design that is strongly aligned with the user’s needs.
For blow drying hair, only two pieces are undisputedly necessary: a component to produce hot air and one to spread this air (heating coils and a small fan). These two components are stored in the housing, which can be seen as the face of the product. This case communicates the design and it builds a connection between product and user. Now, while designing the housing there are some things I needed to keep in mind.
The design needs to support mobility. That’s because a dryer is used as a hand-controlled device and needs to function according to this use. This is an important part of the design to ensure that it gracefully adapts to people's lives. There are two ways of mobility. Dryr embraces both of these concepts and adapts its design to them:
Firstly, people travel a lot so portability would be an important asset. It helps to incorporate the user’s needs and embody the way of user’s life. The dryer also adapts to this lifestyle by being compact and damage resistant.
Secondly, a hair dryer is an extremely important tool for styling hair. The core to an explicit result seems to be the need of precision. This accuracy can only exist when handling the dryer with control.
Mobility helps to achieve this control and enriches the product with reliance and predictiveness. This forms a well known and natural environment for the user. Ideally, a hair dryer should be light, comfortable and well-balanced to ensure optimal user experience.
Coming up with the design
A dryer as simple-looking and clean as possible - that’s the goal.
As I mentioned earlier, I based my design on a normal dryer. But as you may notice, Dryr doesn’t exactly look like most of the dryers. Sure, the basics are the same but their design differs in many ways. These differences are results of simplification.
The most obvious ‘problem’ to solve for simplicity are the buttons. They disturb the design of the clean surfaces and stand out in a distracting way. They cause the surfaces to break (design wise) and sometimes even are highlighted in the dryer design. That especially happens when the button is in a different color than the body. In these cases, the whole dryer design is just ruined. And on top of that, wild colors or color combinations make matters even worse.
So to make sure that this doesn’t happen to Dryr, too, I didn’t add any buttons and made the dryer entirely black. Leaving out the buttons is just a minor change but I also made some fundamental changes.
Hair dryers tend to look complex and don’t fit into their surroundings. They are often stored in cabins - where they are out of sight. The cabins are overstuffed, that’s why you need a long time to get the hairdryer out and ready to go.
In addition, the cables tangle up in a messy chaos so which makes taking out the blow dryer even more time-consuming.
The two issues in a common blow dryer design are storage and the cable. However, I solved both of these problems by simply making the dryer wireless. It might not be technically feasible as of yet (due to energy density reasons), but this design is meant to explore the potential of dryers as the technical possibilities evolve. This way the not particularly nice looking cable doesn’t exist.
Obviously, you need to consider a way to charge the device when it’s wireless. In this case, a charging station is the best solution to offer a clean storage. At the same time, it allows the device to charge.
Using USB-C is a necessity when you want to speed up the process. Magnets on top of the charging station and on the bottom of the handle prevent the hair dryer from tipping and keep everything in place.
Usually, there are at least two different strength settings for the outcoming air. A button or switch controls it. But it needs to disappear in this design.
A good way to do this is to preset the strength on the charging dock. This way, the dryer can remain simple. But the problem won’t be solved by just transferring the buttons to the charger.
Taking some inspiration from the Google home eventually helped me to find a solution:
The user performs several actions on the top. One of these being sound regulation which is somewhat similar to strength regulation for the dryer.
Regulating works by touching a simple smooth plastic surface. Dots with different brightnesses display the current setting. Applying this design to the charging station results in the outer blue part of the charger functioning like the top of the Google home (see the image below).
But how do you turn it on? It’s easy: you don’t.
If you remove Dryr from the charging station it’s because you want to use it. So Dryr can start to dry once removed from the doc. The advantage of not adding a button or switch is a getting clean and simple product. It removes another unnecessary step.
However, there is one emergency button. It’s for when there’s an error and the dryer doesn’t stop. But to keep the design clean, this button is on the bottom of the handle so that it’s not visible at all times.
Design process
Designs don't just materialize out of thin air. They evolve through a long and tedious process, consisting of several phases of brainstorming, exploration of the designs and a lot of changes.
The fundamentals of a dryer are already set: the main body and handle. Taking this foundation, I began to explore directions the design could gravitate to. I started off by sketching basic ideas as thumbnails (quick, simple sketches - usually with no perspective - to explore different ideas). These thumbnail sketches are mostly about finding shapes and rough concepts which you like to explore more. You can think of this first step as a visual brainstorming. All of the design ideas are put on [digital] paper. This means there might be some designs that are not exactly great. But that’s fine because it’s a part of brainstorming. Noticing which designs are not working is an essential part of the design process. Only this way, the bad designs can be eliminated so that you can focus on the good ones.
The dryer (top; right) is a perfect example for this. The idea behind it was to create an organic and flowing looking dryer. But the combination of the certain lines I used created a misfitted harmony.
After creating all of the thumbnails, three designs stood out to me (blue highlights). To me, they somehow had a design, I could see as an actual product.
When further looking at these three concepts, I noticed that they create a visual scale. A scale from a sharp design to a soft design.
The one on the left is closest to a sharp design. This exemplifies clean edges and clear cuts between the different surfaces and components. On the other side, a soft design is more based on organic shapes which embrace flowing natural forms and gentle curves. This design is presented by the dryer on the right. The third one, however, lies in the middle of the scale and has softness but also clear cuts. The combination of both of these elements makes the middle dryer the one with the richest and most balanced design. And that’s the design I choose for Dryr.
I then took this design and created a modified 3d model. And there you go - Dryr.
For the charging station, again I started with thumbnails. Only this time, the designs were more diverse. So I explored some different directions and then looked at all of the thumbnails. I choose three (blue highlights) to explore more.
The bottom one seemed like an interesting idea, but after exploring the shape more I came to the realization that this specific design wasn’t that appealing or practical. The other two designs though were very fitted in my opinion. They embraced the design language of the dryer.
I then took these two designs in a 3d modeling software and created mockups. Both looked very suitable but the round charging station embraced the shape of the dryr - especially its handle - more. That’s why I ended up with this final design (bottom right on blue background).
Final
