I had a revelation inside one of the very hip (and very dark) lobby restrooms at the Ace Hotel. It was at the moment I dropped my hands into the narrow slot at the top of the Airblade hand dryer as if they were pieces of bread to be toasted. It felt vaguely humiliating, the same way opening your mouth super-wide for the dentist does. (My dinner companion said that this peculiar motion reminded him of the way women in the old Palmolive commercials dipped their hands into small bowls of the green fluid.) I wondered why the dryer wasn’t simply designed so that the slot is horizontal. This way it could be accessed in a more relaxed way, especially by those who are especially tall or short or in wheelchairs. A horizontal machine would stick out further from the wall, but could be tucked next to the sink and reached by swinging one’s hands over from under the faucet. It all seemed terribly obvious.
But Dyson, who design and sell the Airblade, care little about ergonomics or common sense. They’re interested in peddling products that look like they’re revolutionary rather than products whose operations are so seamless that they might have a chance to actually be revolutionary. I’ve never used a Dyson vacuum cleaner or fan. Like the Airblade, these products have a high-tech contemporary gloss, with strong shapes, clean lines, and a silvery finish. The vacuum cleaner turns dramatically on a big, visible ball pivot and the fan is a perfect circle. The Airblade doesn’t have those alluring geometries, but it certainly looks a lot smarter than a conventional metal enamel hand dryer, that kind that gets scratched and dented and wheezes and heaves and never really gets your hands dry enough. But is it? It might require less time and energy to dry one’s hands in an Airblade, but it requires a highly unnatural motion. This machine takes the mindless act of drying one’s hands and makes it onerous.