You may or may not have noticed, but I wasn’t around all that much last week and, no, I was not on vacation like our fearless leader, I was trekking ass across the Atlantic for a visit to Malmesbury, England. Yeah, I had no idea where that was until I arrived at Heathrow airport and hopped into a car for a two-hour drive west. I awoke from my slumber to a quaint little town in Wiltshire at the front entrance to Dyson’s HQ. Yes, that Dyson, the folks who make the vacuums that never lose suction.
Now, vacuums typically don’t jump out at me as must-have gadgets, but Dyson’s are unique in that they’re a perfectly balanced blend of style and engineering. They look really cool. A heck of a lot cooler than your mom’s old Hoover, at least.
So what exactly was I doing in Malmesbury at Dyson, you might ask. Well, I had the opportunity to be the first journo to have a peek into Dyson’s RDD center, which is aptly named the hangar. The entire team of 400 or so engineers/designers are situated in a section of the compound that once housed the manufacturing side of the business before it moved to Malaysia. It was huge. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to snap any photos just to show you the ginormity of the space for legal reasons, but just imagine an empty Costco with nothing but work benches.
Stick around this week because I’ll have plenty of content from the trip that includes a one on one with James Dyson where he spills the beans on his love/hate relationship with the iPhone as well as some of his favorite gadgets, which will certainly surprise you because I was floored. Oh, and a short video of James ‘testing’ one of his vacuums for durability, why you’ll want to replace your sheets every day or, at the very least, wash them every few days, and a video of the Airblade sucking in ‘poo air’ and replacing it with clean air. The coolest thing out of the entire trip is that I got to sit down with Will Davies, from the video, and we designed a new attachment for the DC16 aka Root 6. We hammered out a design in roughly four hours over CAD and the next day I walked away with the only prototype. It was sweet. More on that later this week.