The hand drying revolution

Posted by: Dan Prior | 04 October 2007

Whilst at the FOWA (Future of Web Apps) conference I have made an unexpected discovery; the Dyson Airblade hand drier.

At conferences hundreds of people leave a session at the break and many head for the toilets. Nobody likes queuing in toilets so here at the ExCel centre they have installed Dyson's revolutionary new design of hand drier to get people through quicker and obviously prevent queuing.

It is amazing!!  It will do for hand drying what the original Dyson did for vaccum cleaning.  Once you've tried it, you get frustrated with every other conventional hand drier. 

All conventional driers are just like a wall mounted hairdrier, blowing hot air down on to your hands.  I've generally found these fairly ineffective, and the only ones that seem to work are the ones that have a powerful motor and really blast your hands, taking about 30 seconds.  Surely this is very inefficient.  Dyson's approach is completely different but very obvious once you see it.  Simply his system provides an open plastic box which you lower you hands into, which then blows hot air onto your hands from all directions, so that after less than 10 seconds your hands feel really dry.  As well as the obvious consumer benefit, the premisis that installed the device will benefit from reduced enegy costs (Dyson say 83% less), and finally the environment benefits!

I expect that within 5 years nearly every new venue will have airblades or a similar copy installed in the toilets.  

I love innovation, and I think this may be my favourite of the year so far.  Dyson really understands that "Value innovation is about making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested market space."  -- W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy

Posted in: Technology Social