FEATURE
Sworn To Secrecy
Earlier this year, Tomorrow’s Cleaning editor Matt Waring was lucky enough to get a glimpse into the inside world of Dyson, with a visit down to their Wiltshire HQ. He spoke to Design Engineer Nick Schneider in an attempt to try and peel back the shroud of secrecy that covers their research, design and development department, with mixed results.
If you didn’t know it was there, you’d be forgiven for driving straight past it, but hidden in the mist of the Wiltshire countryside is the home of one of the most groundbreaking designers and manufacturers of vacuum cleaners in the world.
Dyson’s instantly recognisable range of vacuum cleaners, hand dryers and, more recently, bladeless fans and heaters grace homes, washrooms and businesses up and down the country, and I went on a special trip to try and find out what they’ve got planned next.
Not that it would be an easy task. The whole base is shrouded in secrecy, and with special thumbprint and ID card scanners throughout the building, I had no chance of even getting close to the company’s Research, Design and Development (RDD) department. Even the doors are opaque so that no passersby can get a quick sneak peek inside.
I did, however, manage to get to sit down with Nick Schneider, a Design Engineer from Dyson’s New Product Innovations department, who explained why the high level of security was such a necessity.
He said: “We invest nearly £3million a week in research and development, and one of the ways that we protect that investment is with confidentiality,
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so everything within RDD is controlled – other members of staff won’t be able to access RDD because it’s essentially by need only, and the reason that is, is to protect our new technology at all stages of development.”
Indeed, the only visitor in recent times that has had the privilege of being allowed into the hallowed grounds of RDD was Prime Minister David Cameron, but Nick was more than happy to fill me in on some of the more recent innovations that he has had a hand in producing, and the excitement that he still gets when he sees his ideas come to fruition.
“From a personal level, to see some of the parts that I worked on come into production is a very satisfying feeling,” he said. “But also, the nature of the way that we operate with the ideas, we tend to be very exploratory, and inherent in that, we can make a lot of mistakes and get things wrong.
“But ultimately, out of all of the things we try, all those slightly wacky, out there ideas that have gone wrong, there’ll be one which show’s real promise, and that’s the one that we take forward and run with. I think to be able to say that you worked on that in New Product Innovations (NPI) and came up with some of those ideas, it’s very exciting, and energising as well.”
But despite there being some crazy ideas that haven’t worked out in the past, the Dyson approach of constantly looking for ways to improve means that any idea, no matter how ridiculous, could still be revisted in the future. And because of that, we can’t find out what they are.
Nick added: “I can’t disclose any ideas that we’ve had because we never know when we might revisit it. There is obviously never a bad idea because, even if we get things totally wrong, we can learn from that experience and could, in light of what we later know, approach it in a different way.
www.tomorrowscleaning.com
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