Product Design Review: Dyson Airblade

Now that I have kids, a wife, and in general more reasons for preoccupation with germs and how illness actually costs me sleep, I'm a ton more aware of their impact. Additionally, having worked in office settings for nearly ten years, where there is a lot of alleged hand washing, I have noticed one thing: people are terrible at washing their hands!

I have seen the following transpire at the wash bowl and it makes me crazy to see it:

1) Two seconds of cold water on the finger tips and running fingers through hair after stall business in the bathroom.
2) Users pass on the mere appearance of caring to wash up, as they won't even make a partial attempt at wetting their hands.
3) Head straight for the paper towels. (If you have something to dry off of your hands and haven't washed w/ very hot and soapy water, you are insane).

I am glad to see that in restaurants there are multi-lingual reminders that employees must wash with hot soapy water. This makes me have some sense of comfort, albeit likely a false one. So, the title of this post sounds like it is going to have something to do with a Dyson product review. The three points above are stated so we can see how ineffective the Dyson Airblade really is if people don't wash their hands the right way.

To date, I have only used the Airblade once. I love Dyson products and have been completely impressed by the Dyson vacuum cleaner we purchased over four years ago, but their product design team really ought to consider increasing the size of the the space for drippy, fake-washed hands so that I'm not handling other people's grossness after I've done my part to clean up properly. When I see the Airblade, I usually look for paper towels (strangely this is usually an alternative whenever an Airblade is present) or I will opt to drip dry.

The blue fingertips in the illustration should be a different color to reflect a less clean environment. Please check back in later for more random product design rants/reviews/praise.