i think it's sort of easier for you as
an inexperienced designer to come up
with something different hi i'm james
dyson i'm here to answer your questions
from twitter this is design support
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so first up from murat dimmer bar what
is the best designed joy to use
product in your life and i've got it
right here
and i bought it in japan about 30 years
ago what makes this pencil sharpener
special and better than all the ones
i've come across the other ones are
plastic and often when you put the
pencil in the thing topples over whereas
this is made of cast aluminium so it's
very heavy and actually it was quite
heavy to carry home from the shop and
bring all the way back from japan it
just works very well doesn't slip around
on the table looks good it's got spots
to store pencils in it and it's worked
for me unfailingly for 30 years the sort
of joy of putting this in and coming out
with a lovely sharp end and the noise it
makes it's just delightful this one's
from rast what is the worst design
appliance you own
and that's a really easy one to answer
and it's a printer
the next question is from doug collins
ux
who are your design heroes and why
well one of my design heroes is alex
agonis who designed the mini what i
really like about the mini which is also
true of the wartman
is when they did some research to find
out whether the mini would sell this
tiny car only 10 foot long with tiny
wheels the market research said it
wouldn't sell
nobody would want a car with cindy
little wheels like that it was just too
small
of course ultimately it became one of
the best selling cars in history and was
still being made 50 years later what i
what i really like about that
is that the khari designed looks as good
today as it did in the late 50s and
that's because it's not styled it's the
sort of opposite of harvey earl javier
is the sort of designer i hate because
it's all fancy wings and it's very showy
it's design put there to appeal to
people to make it sell and this is
another and the interesting thing about
the sony waltman is that
it's a tape recorder that won't record
and that's really really brave because
again they went and asked people do you
want to buy this tape recorder that
doesn't record it just plays back and
everybody said no and i've seen nonsense
nobody everybody wants a tape recorder
that can record but akio morita at sony
had the bravery to see that actually
although no one says they want it he
believed they would want it because they
could put in their pocket and play music
with with earphones which no one had
ever really been able to do before the
next one's quite funny
the next question is from salvatore.com
he says how does such an even light work
you create suction by developing a very
high speed airflow so you have an
electric motor here and a turbine here
and if you turn that very very fast and
we we go about 130 000 rpm with that the
air
is drawn in to the center here and spun
out of the periphery of that turbine at
great speed
and it's so fast that
it draws in more and more air huge
amounts of air and expels them at very
high speed and if you're if you're
drawing in a lot of air into this device
you're creating suction
so that's what suction is next question
is from jose ortega product designers
what was your biggest challenge to
overcome lack of experience
how did you overcome it very
interestingly i think a lack of
experience is a great help an expert
thinks he knows it all but he's also
rather inhibited by his experience his
knowledge and he finds it difficult to
steer off the well-known path whereas if
you have a lack of experience but huge
curiosity and you approach your new
challenge with naivety i think it's sort
of easier for you
as an inexperienced designer to come up
with something different and to follow a
different path i'll give an example when
i when i started to develop my cyclonic
vacuum cleaner separation system
separating dust from air i went to the
experts and they said you'll never make
a cyclone that clears
dust out of air
below 20 microns and 20 microns is a bit
too big because a lot of dust is like
cigarette smoke it's half a micron or
0.3 of a micron but because of my
naivety i thought well
maybe he's wrong and i'll try and make
it work so five and a half thousand
prototypes later i had made it work and
i'd got it down from 20 microns down to
0.3 of a micron i'd advance the science
from being a complete novice
from mrs sloper what do i do if i have
an invention
idea the first thing you should do is
build a prototype and as soon as you
have a product that works you should
then file for a patent if you
go and file a patent before you've made
it work you could get into trouble
because a patent has to be of a product
or technology or an engineering idea
that works and you have to prove that it
works and i'm sometimes asked whether
you can contract out the making of a
prototype to a development company or
model builder or something and indeed
you can do that and if it's a purely
visual model i think that's a perfectly
good thing to do but if it's anything
mechanical or something that has to work
or has a technology you that you've got
to make to work it's much much better
you do it yourself because when you come
to and i hope you don't ever have to do
it but you have to fight a patent action
one of the first things that the person
you're accusing of copying will say to
you or their lawyers will say to you did
you build that prototype yourself what
they'll try and argue is that you didn't
make the invention at all it was the
person who built the prototype who made
the invention i also think that the act
of making it yourself actually
physically making the prototype it's
vital to do that yourself so you fully
understand what you're doing and when it
fails as it probably will as mine always
do i understand why it's failed and i
get an idea as to how i might make it
work
the next one is from frank legendique
quick question out of curiosity
what are your biggest challenges
currently as a ux designer product
designer or product manager owner the
biggest challenge is speed getting a
product done quickly it takes nowadays a
lot of people you have to have a lot of
mechanical designers and product
designers but also you have to have a
lot of fluid dynamics motor engineers
software people ballistics people you
have to have a whole host of people you
didn't have to have 20 25 years ago and
increasingly because other countries are
developing technology and products so
quickly we've got to compete with that
so i would say our biggest single issue
is that we've got to do things quicker
the next question is a bit of a personal
one from annika for pres
it's 2021 and how are hand dryers not
quite yet well i agree with you i have
great sympathy for you but um we're
dealing with airflow devices that go at
120 140 000 rpm
any fast turbine moving air is noisy
think of jet engines when we're
designing new generations of hand dryers
and we've just brought one out actually
it's much quieter and we've dropped it
down to 750 watts from 1200 watts so
we're getting better at it and you're
quite right to complain about it from
chironica
a bladeless fan
this is sorcery
how does dyson do it
bladeless fan came about because we were
looking at airflow technology if you let
out a small blade of air very high speed
jet of air along a particular surface
actually a surface not unlike an
aircraft wing we noticed that it sucked
in from behind it a lot of extra air and
we did a circular blade annulus we call
it outlet of air very tiny it was only a
mill and a half wide and we noticed that
it increased the original airflow by 20
times in the process the airflow was
very smooth it wasn't interrupted or
turbulent whereas a fan with blades
gives turbulent air and of course a
blade is um dangerous the bladed fans
are very difficult to clean they have
their motor in the center of the fan so
the fan is top heavy and it sort of
slumps so we put the motor at the base
so the fan was very stable
and we had it rotate around its center
of gravity so whatever position you put
it in it stayed there
so that's really how the fan came about
it was a very difficult product to
launch because when we showed it to
people they had no idea what it was they
thought it was an amplifier of some sort
from lindsay d young a question for
inventors
how easy have you found it to get your
product on major retailers shelves the
answer that is very simple it's very
very very difficult indeed they don't
know whether your new and different
product is going to sell in many cases
what they'd rather do is just have the
same products they've got before but at
a cheaper price
but nowadays we have the internet i
would suggest that that anyone who wants
to approach retailers or wants to sell a
high volume of their product should
absolutely approach retailers but at the
same time and in parallel sell direct on
the internet because apart from anything
else if you can prove it sells on the
internet the major retailers would be
interested in stocking it the next
question is for mo off the wall
how can inventors peacefully carry on
innovating when filing for a patent
itself costs thousands this is a
headache well i couldn't agree more mo
it's a terrible headache an individual
can't really afford to file a patent and
in particular file a patent in many
countries but the the system is
expensive because the examiner has to
search
through patent offices all over the
world going back many many years to see
if there is a similar invention to yours
but unfortunately
it's the only protection that inventors
have and it's the only system inventors
have it's far from perfect
it was dreamt up by henry iv in 1485 i
think it was and it stayed the same for
600 years and the 20-year life is
exactly the same as it was 600 years ago
so it jolly well needs an overhaul
and it's a system that's desperately
unfair for the individual inventor or
the small business
the next question's from beehoff it's
very interesting one what's the most
important element of design in your
opinion so i'm going to give you my
opinion which is very different to lots
of other people's opinions when i was at
the royal college of art being taught
design i discovered engineering
and i couldn't understand why
engineering was separated from design
why did you have a
white sort of coated engineer in a lab
developing technology and a designer in
a separate design studio often
completely unrelated to the company
developing the product or technology
designing the product so i thought
design should be part of engineering
like alec agonis with his mini so i i
see design as being everything about a
product from the technology to the
engineering
to the design
to how it's ergonomic it is how well it
performs and how long it lasts and what
materials it use and whether it's
sustainable or not so i see design
covering this whole broad range of
disciplines and bringing it all together
in a seamless and uninterrupted way well
that's it for now they were really good
questions absolutely the right questions
to be answering and look forward to next
time goodbye