Dream. Design. Dyson. By Will Kerr

from RGS Guildford – DIALOGUE 2020

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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

Late 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.

And so to the West Country, and to Dyson.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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’.

In the time I’ve worked in the industry, the complexity of the challenges being faced and the products making their way into homes has grown exponentially, but the spirit of the design process is unchanged.

As a young graduate, you have immediate design ownership of small parts and assemblies on high profile projects. For me, it was a concept for a ‘helical drive dog’ which improved the acoustics of a fastspinning brushbar(!?). Seemingly trivial now, but receiving my first granted patent was an exciting step.

In the early stages you learn the basics of engineering drawings, tolerance stacks, user interaction and design for manufacturing. And you learn fast. At any moment, you may be invited to talk through your latest progress with Sir James – as Chief Engineer he still holds a passion to develop the designs day-to-day alongside the engineers themselves.

More recently, based in Singapore, I have followed the company’s growth into South East Asia and now have the opportunity to lead a 300-strong design team across Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Concepts for new products and components such as motors, batteries, and robotics, are imagined in the UK. It is then our task to develop them and ready them for production. Getting a chance to build production lines to realise our ideas at scale, is what brings the greatest reward, and has accented my career so far with the highlights you don’t forget.

Seeing that first machine make it successfully to the end of the production line, with an exhausted team around you, is what makes it worthwhile.

Dyson’s expansion in Singapore has at times been high profile, but reflects the growing importance of markets such as China, Korea and Japan to technology firms like ours.

Having recently spent time in Tokyo and Seoul, what is hugely apparent is the thirst these consumers have for the latest innovative tech, and how, as users, their culture and lifestyle result in requirements that are noticeably different to the West.

Whilst our designers may intuitively understand the needs of a UK home, insights into the priorities of a Japanese family are just as critical – for example, the premium placed on improving indoor air quality and the resultant high awareness of intricacies such as PM2.5 particles.

Comparisons with the RGS are easily drawn. They are both organisations with ambition, invention and restlessness. And at both, you benefit from being surrounded by people of the highest quality.

In my experience, too, a great sense of drive runs through both. In Dyson’s case, trying to compete with fierce, global tech firms with far larger budgets, leads to a constant ‘start-up’ mentality and comes with high pace and high pressure.

In such an environment dominated by commercial, operations, legal and engineering challenges, it is crucial to identify what gives you your energy, and to carve out time for those activities.

For me, it’s still scribbling on top of design drawings and getting hands on with the latest physical prototypes, just as it was after 4pm down in the Technology department at the RGS.