Critical design.
In design, a lot of mistakes get made, and a lot of products get heavily criticised, even if they are one the most famous designers out there.
Take the Dyson hand drier, when first designed the hand drier was a “must have” it appeared everywhere, from hotels to schools to restaurants. It was a brand new take on drying hands, and everyone wanted to try it out.
Due to Dyson’s well known name in driers it must be a good design right? Wrong. When you use the drier and start to break down its features, you soon start to see the cracks.
People were soon seeing that the new dryer wasn’t all that hygienic. Due to the product using nice curvy, flowing shapes, it created a problem with the hygienic aspect of the drier. The way the driver works is by sticking your hands in, fingers facing down the way into some warm blown air. The issue with this is that the water then has to drip some where, and since the shape of the drier is solid, all the water gets stuck at the bottom of the drier. And considering all the germs that will come off in the water, it’s not the most cleanliness product to be touching.
Another major flaw to this design is down to the anthropometrics of the drier. Once you have slipped your hands in to the slot of the drier, it’s soon clear that the gap wasn’t made big enough. You have to hold your hands as still as possible in order to not touch the air outlets or other peoples dirty germs.
Taking all this information into consideration it’s clear to see the product wasn’t designed all that greatly. You would think since the product was designed with the solo purpose of drying hands hygienically by putting your hands in and it being automatic, meaning you’re not having to touch any buttons in order to reduce the risk of germs, that it doesn’t really do it’s function well.
I find it all down to greed, I believe Dyson knew his design wasn’t great to start with, but are money hungry and want to make as much profit as possible. Companies can often get carried away with designing more and more products, and often forget about their standards and relationships with their customers. Because they know that people who are customers with them already will stick with them, because there older products are good.
You can look at a few designs by Dyson and see that he is money hungry. Take the air multiplier for example.
They took an a fan, and made it fan-less. They found that a regular fan doesn’t blow out air smoothly or consistently, so they decided this was a huge problem. Because this was the first fan like this, it. was designed with a gigantic price tag to go along with it. For a regular fan you are looking at around £15–20 for a good one, if you opt for a Dyson you’re looking at £200.
So you have to question, is having a fan that blows air smoothly and gentle really that important when it’s costing you an extra £170? But this is how Dyson is clever. He finds a problem that people didn’t even think that they had, he then improves that problem and leaves people thinking that they have to get it. He leaves people thinking that these new designs are amazing, and solve all problems people faces. But in reality this is far from the truth.
The part that angers me the most about Dyson, is the hype behind him. He has most people believing his work is amazing and that he’s one of the best designers of his time, when in reality he see’s a tiny problem with a product so then makes changes to that product to fix them. This is all well and good, but he then creates other problems with the design because he’s focussed on one issue of the fan, rather than looking at all the issues the product are faces with, but due to everyone believing he’s a modern day hero of technology everyone overlooks all these issues and keeps buying his products. This angers me because there are so many designers out there, designing products to help third world countries and to save life’s on a regular basis, and these get over looked massively due to designers like Dyson.
Jaundice kills thousands and thousands of babies in developing world countries, even though jaundice can be cured very easily. All it needs is a blue on it for a few days, and it clears up. Devices like blue lights don’t exist in these type of countries due to the upkeep of them, they need new bulbs and new parts now and again. But these parts are just in too short of supply in these countries.
Because devices like these are so rare D Rev- a non profit team, designed a gadget for these countries that is cheap and robust. Yet, you never hear about companies like this, or they never get any recognition even though they are doing an amazing thing. It’s designers like this that deserve to be well known and famous, and it’s also designers like this that make me proud to be a designer. It’s designers like these that should influence future designers to design to save the world. If every designer kept in mind everything that’s going on around them, we could all save something or someone.
