The launch of a brand-new Dyson Home product is a relatively rare event. The Wiltshire and Singapore-based company remains best-known for its Dyson vacuum cleaners, a product famously honed and shaped through thousands of prototypes by the brand’s founder, the RCA-trained engineer James Dyson, until it reached an all-conquering state of perfection that upended the industry and – eventually - made Dyson’s fortune.
Dyson’s vacuum technology continues to be refined today, with successful diversions into robotic and wireless models that have required ever more thorough investigation and investment, including the design of bespoke motors, batteries and software. Now there’s a new cleaning device on the horizon. The Dyson WashG1 is the company’s first foray into a ‘wet cleaning’ device.
James Dyson on the Dyson WashG1
Wallpaper* secured an exclusive interview with Sir James Dyson about the genesis of the WashG1 and the great lengths the company goes to ensure its products continue to define and conquer their respective niches.
Firstly, we took a tour of the Dyson R&D centre in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, home to the company’s secretive development and testing labs, alongside the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, an apprentice-based educational facility that’s aimed at upending the UK’s stagnant STEM teaching.
The Dyson campus, designed by Dyson’s long-standing collaborators WilkinsonEyre, is currently home to around 650 engineers. With manufacturing plants in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines (as well as other services, including additional engineering), Dyson uses this site alongside its facility nearby in Lavington and a new software development centre in Bristol, to devise, shape and test its product range. These are the labs where products like the Supersonic hair dryer were prototyped and brought to life, refined and updated.
Hullavington, once home to the Dyson car project, is now the base for robotics research, much of which is still very much under wraps. In an age when industrial secrets can make or break a brand, the Dyson devotion to secrecy is unsurprising. For example, the main R&D lab in Malmesbury, Building D9, has a mirrored façade to keep prying eyes from divining future design ideas.
Elsewhere on the vast site, with its restaurants, student accommodation, offices and scattering of industrial design classics, is the main testing facility, a large high-tech shed filled with smaller lab modules. These include a household dust chamber, complete with row of medical grade glove box workstations to avoid any form of contamination. The world of vacuum cleaner design has a standardised ‘test dust’; Dyson prides itself on using real dust as well, often gleaned from under the sofas and behind the radiators of its own employees.
Another lab houses an electromagnetic radiation test set-up, whilst yet another contains a semi-anechoic chamber, a hushed space for calibrating sound and delving into the psychoacoustics of exactly what a hair dryer or vacuum cleaner should sound like. Elsewhere, we see a vacuum cleaner wired into a mechanical jig so that the same actions and angle of use can be replicated over and over again.
A nearby cupboard is filled with sample debris, from various types of rice to different pasta shapes and cereals from around the world (American Cheerios are, we learn, larger and stickier than their British counterparts). Every year, Dyson does a global dust study, forensic-level research that goes on to shape everything from filters and brushes, attachments and software, and how each element might differ depending on the market.
Market forces also drove the development of the WashG1. By reinventing the vacuum cleaner, Dyson tapped into an existing market for an object found in a vast number of homes around the world. An even larger percentage of homes don’t have carpets at all, favouring hard floor surfaces that have traditionally been mopped clean.
As Dyson himself makes clear, this is an unsatisfactory approach. ‘At its most basic, what you're doing a lot of the time is merely spreading dirty water across the floor,’ he says. ‘Whilst there are some floor-washing machines that are either very big and clumsy, or they have nasty filters in them, which get very grungy and don't actually clean the floor very well.’
Dyson WashG1: a new way to clean the floor
The WashG1 is the company’s solution. An elegant wireless upright, complete with docking station, it follows the established Dyson aesthetic of luminous colour and sober grey plastic, with discrete control screen, chunky ergonomics and two clear liquid containers. On top is your reservoir of clean water. During operation, this is pumped through a snaking network of pipes and carefully applied along the length of two counter-rotating microfabric rollers. Dirty water is squeezed off via a flexible blade and part siphoned, part sucked back into the lower receptacle, where it takes on the hue of whatever it is you’ve been mopping up (a process that’s both distressing and deeply satisfying).
‘We've gone to great lengths to make sure that nothing is left on the floor,’ Dyson continues, pointing out the various deficiencies of other mechanical methods, not least the fact they usually nowhere for solid objects to go (the WashG1 has a separate tray to catch them) and their single roller design just ends up pushing whatever you’ve spilt or stained around the floor.
In contrast, the WashG1’s removable dirty water container can simply be poured down the drain and you can run a self-cleaning programme whilst the device is docked. In (controlled) demonstrations, the WashG1 worked as promised, gliding back and forth over a range of test surfaces and mopping up coffee, ketchup and a scattering of cereal.
Asked how he’d characterise the company’s engineering-driven approach, Dyson replies simply that ‘we're really trying to solve problems and we do a huge amount of testing.’ He concludes that the company’s approach is about not conforming to what’s gone before, and then refining and refining their method until it works better than the alternative. ‘Everybody here is encouraged to think bravely and not be afraid of pioneering and doing things differently, even if they might appear slightly odd,’ he says.
Dyson on design: from robotics to recycling
The Dyson-driven approach to domestic design has changed the shape of many familiar household objects, but for now the company’s forays into other areas of life are rather lower key – for now. As well as haircare and air purifiers, there’s the Dyson Lighting division, spearheaded by Jake Dyson, as well as tentative first steps into a range of urban audio products, starting with the Zone with its large air filter. Commercial grade versions of most of these technologies are also available, as a visit to any airport bathroom around the world will reveal.
One venture that didn’t hit the mark was Dyson Automotive, a passion project turned major engineering project that resulted in a fully functional prototype battery electric vehicle. The problem? It was fundamentally at odds with the shifting commercial realities of the car market. Dyson is sanguine about this ‘failure’, and the company has been remarkably up front about the five-year process, with all its highs and lows.
‘The problem of the car was more complex,’ he explains, ‘When we started it in 2014 there was only really Tesla in the game and industry predictions were for 2 per cent penetration by 2030. And I thought, well, that's wrong. That can't be right, it's got to be more than that.’ The design brief was for a car that did 600 miles on one charge – still barely achievable today – because as Dyson says, ‘everybody does a 600-mile journey once a year at least.’
Progress was promising until Volkswagen’s self-inflicted Dieselgate scandal broke. Perversely, Dyson pegs this underhand attempt to skirt pollution rules as the turning point for Dyson Automotive. After Dieselgate, the big players piled in to EV technology, soaking up any losses on development and sales with their more margin-friendly conventional SUV offerings (offsetting their carbon footprint with their new EVs). For established players, it was a win-win. But even for a well-resourced start-up like Dyson Automotive, the sums simply didn’t stack up.
Talk to the head of any big manufacturing concern and you’ll often get a flurry of statistics and pledges about carbon neutrality and recycling schemes. Dyson’s engineering background and outspoken nature allows him to be much more considered and realistic about how to address these key challenges.
Plastic? Recycle, for sure, but also reduce – make the structure stronger but thinner, for example. One legacy of the automotive work was a renewed focus on proprietary batteries, just as the company started its own electric motor production from scratch, controlling every aspect of design, manufacturing and distribution to ensure components were tailored to their requirements.
‘Logistics is really the last remaining hurdle,’ Dyson says of the burgeoning circular economy, pointing out that getting something back to a factory for recycling is much harder than shipping out brand new products. ‘We absolutely build [recyclability] in,’ he says. ‘Can we recycle everything? Can we recycle batteries? Can we recycle the plastic, the recycled aluminium. Yes… but you also have to be careful about the energy used in the recycling process. Because the moment you start doing that, it becomes questionable whether it's a good idea to recycle it.’
Time is up and we’ve barely touched on Dyson’s work on robotics – tantalisingly previewed in these images – or one of his other great passions, farming. Dyson Farming owns land throughout the UK and is researching space- and energy-efficient ways of growing produce, including peas, potatoes and strawberries. Finally, there’s the successful Dyson Institute, a concrete and credible way to bring fresh blood to the UK’s STEM workforce.
James Dyson has faced many challenges over his career, from engineering conundrums to bureaucratic hurdles. The latter still rankle, and Dyson still believes that excessive government inference ‘inhibits invention and innovation.’ ‘Customers want efficiency – and that’s what we want to do,’ he says. ‘If Dyson is going to survive, it’s got to lead the consumer in the right direction.’
Dyson WashG1, £599.99, available soon from Dyson.co.uk, @Dyson
