JUST TOO MUCH

So many everyday products are conceived without a drop of design intelligence (e.g. paper cups, hair clips, printers, windows) that it seems rude to complain about objects that are over-designed. But as consumers become more design-savvy, brands are putting extra efforts into product design that don’t always add up.

A few years ago, when Apple launched their smart watches, the company had reached a point of design fatigue. After a string of inventive, innovative devices (i.e. the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad) the Apple Watch felt unnecessary, as if had been developed in response to market research rather than genuine need. It looked less like a technological instrument than an expensive amulet strapped to the wrist.

Like Apple, Dyson uses product design to elevate their products to the level of luxury goods, but their design ethos takes the opposite approach. While Apple uses a restrained palette and flush joinery to create an aura of opulent, intelligent minimalism, Dyson exaggerates the joining of disparate materials and parts to create an image of advanced mechanical functionality.

That sensibility is now approaching caricature. The brand’s Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner is cartoonish, with parts in unharmonious colors and awkward proportions. The design calls the user to marvel at the suction mechanism with an enormous clear canister, and the swiveling brush with an enormous purple ball joint. The brand would like to present the vacuum cleaner as an iconic machine, like a small car. What does this repositioning accomplish, if the object is so ungainly that one keeps it hidden in the closet?

Dyson Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner.

May 30, 2018 by Nalina Moses

I had a revelation inside one of the very hip (and very dark) lobby restrooms at the Ace Hotel. It was at the moment I dropped my hands into the narrow slot at the top of the Airblade hand dryer as if they were pieces of bread to be toasted. It felt vaguely humiliating, the same way opening your mouth super-wide for the dentist does. (My dinner companion said that this peculiar motion reminded him of the way women in the old Palmolive commercials dipped their hands into small bowls of the green fluid.) I wondered why the dryer wasn’t simply designed so that the slot is horizontal. This way it could be accessed in a more relaxed way, especially by those who are especially tall or short or in wheelchairs. A horizontal machine would stick out further from the wall, but could be tucked next to the sink and reached by swinging one’s hands over from under the faucet. It all seemed terribly obvious.

But Dyson, who design and sell the Airblade, care little about ergonomics or common sense. They’re interested in peddling products that look like they’re revolutionary rather than products whose operations are so seamless that they might have a chance to actually be revolutionary. I’ve never used a Dyson vacuum cleaner or fan. Like the Airblade, these products have a high-tech contemporary gloss, with strong shapes, clean lines, and a silvery finish. The vacuum cleaner turns dramatically on a big, visible ball pivot and the fan is a perfect circle. The Airblade doesn’t have those alluring geometries, but it certainly looks a lot smarter than a conventional metal enamel hand dryer, that kind that gets scratched and dented and wheezes and heaves and never really gets your hands dry enough. But is it? It might require less time and energy to dry one’s hands in an Airblade, but it requires a highly unnatural motion. This machine takes the mindless act of drying one’s hands and makes it onerous.

October 23, 2012 by Nalina Moses