There was a time not too long ago when you had to look for the exact replacement for the vacuum cleaner bag to change it. Cumbersome, like the same device. You had to do somersaults so that the cable did not get tangled between the legs of the furniture and reach the corners. If we speak in the past tense, it is (largely) due to Sir James Dyson, who first took the bags off vacuum cleaners without losing suction, and then freed them from the cable and made them into broom-like shapes. Even teenagers get by without complaining too much!
Then came the Supersonic dryers, silent, light and ultra-fast, the cordless hair straighteners, the stylers, the air purifiers, the lights... The only thing that resisted was the electric car, which it did not launch when it was ready for reasons of profitability. . In a conference at the Palais de Tokyo –with the stick of a vacuum cleaner as a pointer– and an exceptional meeting with journalists in Paris, Dyson spoke of successes, failures and young engineers and scientists as the great engine of change. Of course, at 75, he is fit, he does not think about retiring and goes to work every day.
One vacuum cleaner, 5,127 prototypes. “There is no eureka moment,” James Dyson knowingly asserts. To make a revolutionary vacuum cleaner with its own technology based on cyclones, it took more than 5,000 tests. “When you start you don't know where you're going, because you're looking to do what no one has ever done. If you try to be conventional, and do what is correct a priori, you will do what everyone else does”, he comments.
Trial and error until the final triumph: making our lives easier: “I have never been attracted to glamorous products. I want to make products that are more efficient, that use less energy, with more sustainable materials, more practical and easy to use”, he says. “For me, designing is about how to make something work, not about how beautiful it is. A product has to express itself through what it does”, he affirms. His strategy has made him one of the greatest fortunes in England.
“I admire people who solve problems,” says Dyson. And "it's not the politicians", he specifies to the Magazine. He has described himself as "persevering, determined, impatient and thorough." Before creating and running an engineering-led company, he studied at the Royal College of Art in the days of exhilarating Swinging London. There he realized that the technology that made things work was just as interesting as the fledgling design concept. The first to test his projects are the engineers from his company “my wife is very critical”, he says with English humour. “They evaluate how it works, not whether they like it or not. The fact that a hairdryer has a hole in the middle makes it memorable, but it also has to work wonderfully”, he comments.
"Trust your instincts more than the experience of others," he advises young people. Bet on them "because they are not afraid, nor preconceived ideas of how things should be done and they adapt better to a world that changes very quickly," she says. She looks to the future with optimism and without fear of new technologies: "They open up interesting perspectives and will solve historical problems of products that can repair themselves and become more efficient," she predicts.
Among his latest shareable projects is standing up to the effects of urban pollution. In the last semester of the year, noise reduction headphones that look like science fiction will arrive in Spain: they can be coupled with an air purifier that covers the nose and mouth and is capable of capturing 99% of particle pollution of up to 0.1 microns.
