My first encounter with the Dyson Airblade, a new design for a public hand dryer, was at Central station in my home city. The designer is well-known for his brilliant design for a vacuum cleaner (still too expensive for me to want to experience its brilliance personally) and his obsession with high-speed cyclonic air currents informs the design of the Airblade.
My objections to the design are that (1) its interface is physically unpleasant and unhygienic; (2) it is extremely noisy. The illustrations in this article and on the page linked above show that to use this device you must put your hands inside a cavity through two narrow apertures. I don’t know how long the Airblade at Central Station had been installed, but it was covered already in dried, sticky streaks of dirty water that had been blown off patrons’ hands. In use it is permanently wet, cold and greasy to touch. And it is difficult to use the device without touching the surface of the manacle-like portals or the restricted interior volume. One of the ergonomic problems associated with the use of extremely fast-moving, pressurised air is the extremely loud noise it makes, loud enough to damage human beings‘ hearing and never better than irritating to hear in a public space. The Airblade is as loud as you could expect ‘unheated air travelling at over 640 km/h’ to be. For the reasons given above, it is the last place I would wish to put my hands. The whole thing is as inviting of physical interaction as a meat grinder.
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