Fan as Lamp: James Dyson Reinvents the Fan

Fans are enjoying a second look because, compared to air conditioning, they save energy and money.  The bigger, the better: a  new line of fans calls itself Big Ass Fans, without any embarrassment.

            But in fact fans are also about ambiance.  Think of the slow weary turning of the ceiling fan in Rick’s Place—no wonder Casablanca was chosen as the name of a ceiling fan manufacturer. 

James Dyson’s new fans radiate a different mood, one that is both high tech and high concept.  He does not even call them fans, but “air amplifiers.”

            After such verbiage, is it any wonder I approached the device with skepticism?

            It has the look and feel of the sort of device you would find at Brookstone, the mall technology chain.   Are you supposed to put your arm through the ring, perhaps for killing bacteria, perhaps to soothe sore muscles?  Is it an ionizer or white noise generator perhaps?

            I am pretty conservative when it comes to fans. 

I have been pleased for years with my discreet black Vornado, created by a Kansas firm and compounded of aviation technology and the inspiration of the local weather.

            There are fashions, in fans, of course.  This summer I see a lot of tall thin ones that mimic air purifiers. And then there are the the hyper engineered  products of Big Ass Fans: “the last thing that crossed our mind was matching your décor,” the ads proclaim of these huge “high performance air movement solutions.”

 

            Is Dyson just a passing fashion?

  Consumer Reports, never the most esthetically sensitive publication, actually came out and made fun of the Dyson fan in its July issue. In its “Claim Check” feature it singled out the Dyson, comparing it with conventional table fans priced under $35. “The price is amplified too”   Consumer Reports writes that the “price is 299.99—that’s $300 if you were asleep.” 

            Conventional fans can look old fashioned.  Often, they have  greasy dusty blades.  The Dyson appears more efficient—-like a jet plane compared to a propeller plane.

Long and complex text on the box of the device explains how it works. I read it and couldn’t understand much.  The one phrase that stick in my mind is this: air passes out something called an “annular aperture.”

            I never worried that much about choppy air, except when the airline pilot warned about it.  Then I saw Dyson talking choppy air, on a video in an appliance store. In the clip Dyson talks about “buffeted air” and says that “fan design hasn’t changed much since about 1890.”

            Does the air suffer when blades of old fans chop it?

            But I had missed the underlying message.  It lies in “no blades.” 

Only when I looked at other customers---all males---studying the Dyson at my nearby appliance superstore did I understand.  They looked like guys watching the playoffs on a wide screen. They talked  about bladelessness: and then I understood: blades menace tiny infant fingers and cat tails that might somehow, even if improbably, stray inside a fan’s screen.

            Last summer, Dyson held a party at the Pomegranate Gallery in SoHo to show off larger, floor models of the new fans.   The new models included new shapes, like an elongated oval, and seen all together they suggested radio antennas of some kind.   Dyson invited Murray Moss in, for a de facto design blessing of the idea. The even suggested that Dyson’s ambition goes well beyond a single fan: he wants to change the whole way we see the fan. 

             It seems to me that what Dyson has effectively done is reinterpret the fan as a lamp.  

             With a lamp, we are willing to pay for design.     

             Yes, one might find an acceptable fan for a tenth the price at Wal-Mart.  But the same could be said of lighting:  adequate but homely lamps are cheap.  Light is not just about functional illumination, it is about mood and ambiance.  And fans are not just about moving air.

  If the Dyson device  were a $300 Italian lamp no one would complain so much; a recent New York Times Home Section box offered up an $1800 table lamp without flinching.

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