DYSON: A New User Group

It is 8 AM on a weekday. The father and son wakes up from their beds and joins the breakfast table that the mother had prepared earlier in the morning. After breakfast the son goes to school and the father goes to work. The mother is left behind with chores to do. This is a very common scenario in many homes throughout the world. The mother is always the one that cooks, cleans, and etc. This is why many home appliances are design in favor to female users. Like this, there are many products that are specifically designed for a specific gender. However, these days many companies try to reverse the gender role idea, from the user being a female to male and vice versa.

A great example of reversing gender roles in product users can be Dyson’s vacuum cleaners. Dyson became famous not only because they came up with an idea of a vacuum cleaner without dust bags, but because the “look” of their product as well. Before the Dyson vacuum cleaners were out, vacuum cleaners that were used in homes were designed specifically for female users since they were the ones who used the vacuum cleaner at homes. They all were somewhat organically designed with elegant contours and non-aggressive forms. However, Dyson’s vacuum cleaners were different in their “look.”

Dyson came up with a whole new “look.”This “look” immediately gave meaning to the Dyson vacuum cleaner. They chose strong and aggressive form language that quickly attracted male users. Because of this, many male users were striving to buy this newly released product and were quickly obsessed with this product like they were obsessed with power tools (which power tools have similar form languages). Also, due to social changes where now the father and mother both work as well as do house chores, many male users started to be more comfortable in helping their wives vacuuming the house just because they wanted to take the chance of using the “cool-looking” Dyson vacuum cleaner.

As Dyson came up with the male appealing design of a vacuum cleaner they had succeeded tremendously in the market. However, this success was possible because Dyson had noticed there was a social change happening in many households. That social change was that female users weren’t the only ones who use vacuum cleaners. Due to the fact that in many households the husband and the wife both go out to work they would divide house chores evenly as well. That makes the husband a common user of a vacuum cleaner. Dyson caught this social change and evolved its design based on it. After Dyson had succeeded many companies started to manufacture similar products that were much cheaper than the Dyson. I personally own the cheaper version from a company named Eureka. The design is not perfectly the same; however, the form language of the Dyson vacuum cleaner remains the same.