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DIALOGUE Issue #5 2020
Will Kerr OG 2005 graduated from University of Nottingham with an MEng degree in Product Design and Manufacture and was recognised with a design award from the Royal Society of Arts. He joined Dyson as a graduate in 2010. In 2019 Will became Head of Product Development, South East Asia, based in Singapore. He has worked on early concept development in the UK, through to manufacturing & operations in Malaysia & Singapore. Projects have included self-righting cylinder vacuums, cord-free battery technology, robotics, vision systems and machine-learning.
DREAM. DESIGN. DYSON. Will Kerr OG 2005
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ate on a Friday night, standing on a humid production line in Johor Bahru, across the Straits from Singapore, you can’t help but feel a long way from the career options neatly described on cards in Mr Mant’s Careers Library back in Guildford. At school, ‘engineering’ was a pretty foreign concept for me, but by gravitating towards maths, physics and technology, a master’s degree in Product Design and Manufacture at the University of Nottingham soon followed. On reflection, it was perhaps the innovation that Mr Kelly was bringing to our sixth form Technology classes that lit the fire for design and ‘making things’. I remember clearly the first 3D printer the school acquired, enabling us to print our designs into physical components while we watched. I was hooked – and the 16:26 to Haslemere station was missed all too often. Upon leaving university, I managed to convince an award-winning design consultancy in London Bridge to take me on. Immediately I was to work on live
projects, designing flat-screen TVs and smart tablets for some of the biggest electronics companies in the world. I thought it was the dream ticket. Soon though, I realised that an RGS education meant that, for me, design needed to be grounded in science, logic and genuine breakthrough. Making black squares look as similar as possible to a Californian product, just wasn’t going to cut it.
Dyson employs 6,000 engineers and scientists globally, with over half based in the UK. It remains a private company and invests over £10m per week in R&D. As a young graduate, the vast campus littered with design icons such as a Harrier Jump Jet in the car park and a Concorde engine in the café, is daunting but exhilarating. Situated north of Bath with over 129 laboratories, 200+ live projects are currently being worked on.
In June, I was fortunate to have a Zoom call with a current RGS sixth form student. He was trying to decide whether to attend a top university or to accept an offer to join The Dyson Institute, a university created on the Dyson campus in Wiltshire.
The ethos running through the site is that of iterative design – design, build, test – and the rich lessons you learn from failure. So when Dyson engineers stand on stages to launch products in front of the media, you’ll hear them talk of the “5,127 prototypes it took to reach the final design”. Hyperbole perhaps, but factual none the less.
Having spent ten years working for the company and attended ten of the most remarkable Christmas parties you could imagine, I was able to share the merits of this private design firm – so often in the public spotlight in recent years.
Unless our engineers can demonstrate that a concept truly works, and is better than anything else out there, then that project will be consigned to the bottomless archive of designs to ‘nearly make it’.
And so to the West Country, and to Dyson.
