Boeing - Improving the Flighting Experience
Live Well Collaborative Summer 2017
Cynthia Vanderwall BOEING sponsor
Ming Tang UC DAAP Faculty Co-lead
Blake Lane Graduate Research Fellow, PhD student Co-lead
Adriana Navarro Sainz Graduate Research Fellow, MDes Design research
+12 MDes and Bachelor's UC students.
*This is a confidential project
A sixteen-week long design research studio sponsored by BOEING. This project builds on the research and concepts of the nine prior Boeing studio projects to create a flight attendant in a virtual environment that utilizes cutting edge technology to enhance the in-flight experience for passengers, as well as improve crew productivity.
Process + Methods
Utilizing human-centered design methods, the process included participatory workshops, interviews with flight attendants and passengers, technology benchmarking, airport exploration, data collection, ideation, scenarios, sketching, wireframes, user testing and prototyping.
Preliminary Research
The LWC team had the opportunity to take a field trip to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG). Lead flight attendant Kara Vanneman and other Delta employees took the team on an exclusive tour of the Delta facilities at CVG. The goal was to explore current flight attendant roles, tools, and tasks to identify areas of design opportunity.
In the first weeks, the LWC team focused on investigating innovative technologies and trends emerging in the realm of virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence/robotics. The designers researched various market sectors, including Entertainment, Healthcare, Education, Public Services, and Sports/Recreation. These technological advances assisted the LWC teams in projecting technology trends for the next 10-15 years.
Through interviews with the flight attendants and frequent flyers, the LWC team was able to better understand the pleasure points and pain points that exist when flying, and begin to identify opportunities for AR/VR within the flight journey. The attendants provided explanations of the challenges faced during their jobs, while passengers helped the team map the flight journey from their perspective. For the first session, the team split up in groups to tackle the different parts of the flying journey: boarding, in-flight and descent/deplaning. In the descent/deplaning team, we created a 'map your journey' tool for they to help us understanding their experience.
The data collected through primary and secondary research were synthesized on two experience maps, highlighting the tasks performed and identifying potential areas of opportunity during the descent/deplaning process.
Ideation
Based on the flight attendants insights, the teams identifying three main themes to work on: task management, efficiency and communication. During the ideation phase, the focus was to do research and develop concepts on those three areas.
During this phase, a co-creation session was conducted with flight attendants to find out specific needs within those three themes. The set of cards below was designed as a co-creation tool for the flight attendants to 'build' their own robot or system, prioritizing concepts and functions.
'Build Your Own Robot' design tool
Participatory session
User feedback
Refinement
The LWC team detailed and refined core concepts emerging from each group during the third round of interactions. Each team created near-final renderings of the concepts to present to the flight attendants. The focus during this last interaction was on rank and test final concepts.
Final Outcomes
The final concepts were a virtual assistant, smart robot and a luggage bot. Due to confidentiality agreements, final concepts cannot be shown.