Quote:
Originally Posted by
gdl203 
Some people love to be contrarian when it comes to successful designs. They think it's cool to be that way. Others just enjoy benefitting from better designs without thinking whether their opinions on vacuum cleaners makes them cool or not.
I'm not sure if vacating your home after vacuuming then coming back to findi the place covered with dust after a couple of weeks is contrary. Maybe it's a hipster thing? The Miele means I no longer have anything near that level. The design-focused from a purely aesthetic point who talk authoritatively about engineering with no actual knowledge of engineering tend to be the set who talk like the above. It's why they invariably end up with Dysons, Apples et al
by choice - products of prima donna industrial designers with too much emphasis on the 'designer' and too little on the 'industrial'. Their ego does the rest of the convicing that they know what they're buying. They don't, but their egos won't allow them to realise that. For me, as an engineer who turns himself to design every now and again, anything mechanical has a point of interest to me - but with absolutely zero interest in vacuum cleaners, I did the thing that most people who could care less but have reasonable income do, which is to buy the most expensive one in the shop and assume it works the best - or at least somewhere among the best. That's exactly what I did with the DC01 because it was expensive and because it looked the most interesting - and when they broke, or when I found they didn't tackle something, I just bought a different DC because
they always had something which would do what the previous one didn't do, and it didn't require additional thought in selection. That is until I ended up buying a Miele to replace a then-current Dyson after a recommendation. The difference was absolutely profound. It may look like a beetle as opposed to some exotic piece of machinery, but it just plain works better. Nothing contrarian about it at all. While Dyson may have started out with an engineering focus when he was developing the prototypes, every Dyson - even from the DC01 onwards I now realise - is firmly about marketing and design. 'Innovations' as with Apple, are merely better-marketed-to-the-chattering-classes developments of previous technology. Now with something as prosaic as a vacuum cleaner, is it dumber to be impressed by the design or by how it works?
