Chicago is home base for Dyson’s U.S. operations and the technology company has a new call center in Aurora that will employ 300 people at full capacity. James Dyson, founder and chief engineer, took a few minutes to chat with the Tribune about consumer trends and getting more young Americans interested in engineering. Below is an edited transcript.
Q: This year marks the 10th anniversary of your entering the U.S. market. What have you learned from the American consumer decade during the last decade?
A: They love technology and good design. That’s quite clear. So they’ve reacted very enthusiastically to the technology and the products we’ve launched. I’m a very enthusiastic technology person myself, and I just love developing technology and building new products. It’s wonderful to see people reacting well to that and wanting to buy them.
Q: Do American consumers have any particular quirks?
A: You’re very upright. Americans, by and large, buy upright vacuum cleaners — ones you push around. The rest of the world buys canisters, ones you pull around. It has to do with a historical thing. Americans are almost the only ones in the world who use fitted, wall-to-wall carpeting. And carpets need a beater bar (a tool with stiff bristles), whereas the rest of the world had (mostly) hard floors and didn’t need a beater bar. The main characteristic of an upright is it has a beater bar.
And there’s a trend — a good trend I hope we’re helping drive — toward much lighter machines. Vacuum cleaners used to be heavy, but they don’t need to be heavy. Indeed, we’re having huge success with our cordless vacuum, the Digital Slim … the digital motor spins at 110,000 (revolutions per minute). The fastest other motor of any type, not just vacuum cleaners, is 30,000 or 40,000 RPM. The advantage of speed is that you can get it much more electrically efficient, and you can make it smaller and lighter, so it means that batteries last longer. We’ve invested about $150 million into these motors … Demand outstripped supply by about four to one last year. We’re just now starting to catch up.
Q: What design and engineering challenges are you looking forward to tackling next?
A: Certainly using fewer materials, using less electricity, less energy, less water — these are all really important things. And making products lighter and more efficient, both electrically and in performance. I think in the past, we’ve been able to make things bigger to make them work better or faster. The big challenge for engineers is you have to do more with less.
Q: Encouraging young people, both here and in the U.K., to pursue engineering careers has been a major priority for you. For example, Dyson is holding an afterschool engineering workshop in conjunction with Chicago Public Libraries next week and has another four planned if the Chicago Teachers Union goes on strike. Are you seeing progress?
A: We get encouraging feedback, but there’s a huge mountain to climb. America produces 12 lawyers for every one engineer. You spend more on marketing than you do on research and development … Iran produces the same amount of engineers out of universities as you do in the United States. China and India each produce about 20 times the engineers as you do in the United States. What worries me about this is future technology will therefore come from those countries that produce large numbers of engineers and scientists.
(In Chicago), we’re taking advantage of this potential strike by working with the public libraries and offering design and technology teaching so children can go into the libraries and go get some work done.
I think you need to catch children young and get them interested in engineering and science and show them what an exciting thing it is to do. It’s going to be a very wealthy profession because they’re absolutely vital to regenerating industry. Developing technology is the only way forward if you want to grow and create wealth. And engineers and scientists are the key to doing that.
For more information about Dyson’s engineering workshops, email: [email protected].
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