AIR TRAVEL DESIGN GUIDE
A guidebook for airport stakeholders, designers, and air travel enthusiasts.
the challenge
Facilitate a rethinking of how to design air travel, its objects, spaces, and systems, by putting the human experience at the forefront.
the outcome
A book and accompanying website that examines the ubiquitous architectural, industrial, and sociological elements of the air travel experience.
TYPE:
Ethnographic Research
Collaborators:
Harvard Graduate School of Design
KEYWORDS:
Design Ethnography, Human-centered design
Similar projects:
Experiential Wayfinding
Passenger Flow Analytics
The Air Travel Design Guide is a guidebook for airport stakeholders, designers, and air travel enthusiasts. It aims to describe the design of artifacts, spaces, and systems that impact the passenger experience of air travel.
The project is an analysis of the toolkit of tactics deployed by airports and airlines to guide passengers along. It catalogs a range of artifacts that passengers interact with during air travel: 1) documenting the design decisions embedded within them, 2) identifying their impact on passenger perception, and 3) speculating on alternative scenarios for design and passenger interaction.
Our goal is to facilitate a rethinking of how to design objects, spaces, and systems by putting the human experience at the forefront.
An important ambition of the guide is to improve understanding of the air travel passenger experience. It approaches this complex process through careful, focused study of the specific artifacts and processes that passengers engage with during air travel, using the resultant catalog of artifacts to document broad themes in the contemporary air travel experience and identify opportunities for design intervention embedded within.
The Air Travel Design Guide represents the culmination of the first phase of research, and will serve as a springboard for future phases of research within the Future of Air Travel project at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
www.airtraveldesign.guide is a website companion to an associated research publication titled, On Flying: The Toolkit of Tactics that Guide Passenger Perception. The book describes and quantifies the effects of various architectural and physical elements on the air travel passenger experience, as well as the tactics that travelers develop in response to them.
Our Approach and Expertise