One of the most enduring problems in experience design is how to ensure that products designed for efficiency and production economy still provide the requisite degree of personal comfort for those who use them. A case in point concerns the airline industry, which through trial and error has come to the conclusion that future airliners must offer comfort greater than is currently the case. Airline travelers will agree.

In the md-90s, a design trend favoring jumbo and “superjumbo” aircraft became dominant in response to airline and air-traffic efficiency concerns. One result is the Airbus A-380. Able to carry between 550 and 800 passengers, this four-engine, double-deck superjumbo airliner stretches the limits of conventional airliner parameters. Passenger comfort is assured (Airbus claims) by resorting to time-tested factors: interior layouts and appointments, seating sizes and arrangements, adequate cabin pressurization and air circulation, colors and textures of materials, ease of movement (including evacuation), passengers services (including meals), well-trained flight attendants, and in-flight communications and entertainment.

The A-380 is essentially a scaled-up conventional airliner, albeit a leap for manufacturers and airlines alike. Its paradigm is the same that was used by Dutch airplane designer Frederick Koolhoven to design the first commercial airliner in 1919: engine, fuselage, landing gear, wings, tail, and adjustable flight surfaces, with the passengers sitting in a cabin behind the cockpit. All very linear.

Airbus, testing early passenger acceptance of the A-380, reports that it

...went to huge lengths to find out what passengers themselves wanted. Vast cabin mock-ups were taken to eight major cities on three continents and the views of 1,200 frequent travellers – male and female and from a range of cultures and nationalities – were listened to.

This typical prototyping practice (described in IDEO's downloadable paper, Experience Prototyping (PDF)) produced no surprises, just a very nice, conventional -- though somewhat splashy -- interior design. No doubt, flying First Class among 500 passengers will be a different experience from flying Economy among 800. (That is, when Airbus gets around to delivering the A-380. Aviation history's only superjumbo is over a year late due to manufacturing challenges.)

Reacting to the A-380's early announcements, Boeing Commercial Airplanes began a daring experiment to create a non-conventional airliner based on the radical “flying wing” paradigm. Flying wings have enormous lift and carrying capacity, but inherently are difficult to fly and thus more suited to high-stakes military applications (like the B-2 Stealth Bomber) than commercial air travel. Boeing, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force in the late-90s embarked on a plan to introduce a new paradigm, the “blended-wing” aircraft (BWA) combining the flying wing's cargo-carrying efficiency with traditional aircrafts' ease of control. “How Flying Wings Will Work,” in HowStuffWorks.com, describes these advantages. Like the A-380, the Boeing superjumbo would carry up to 800 passengers, but it would do away with the typical fuselage and place the passengers in the center of the aircraft, enclosed within the wing. This design is clearly depicted in an article on The Wing Is The Thing. As for passenger comfort, Boeing relied on the tried and true factors: color, texture, and spaciousness, as described in a Boeing article, “The Psychology of Comfort in Airplane Interiors.”

Everything went swimmingly until passengers were confronted with mockups of the BWA interior. (This may have happened at the Teague Customer Experience Center operated by Boeing's Seattle-based design partner, Walter Dorman Teague & Associates.) According to sketchy reports (the only ones available to the public), the passengers revolted. Besides the auditorium seating, passengers resented the lack of windows to see outside. No matter that windows on conventional aircraft are barely useful when a plane is in flight (especially at high altitudes, at night, and in inclement weather). Passengers wanted to be able to see “out.” In a recent article, “The Sky's The Limit,” The Economist reported:

Boeing once toyed with a blended wing-body, a sort of flying wing, to produce dramatically better aerodynamics and fuel efficiency. Passengers would have sat in a wide cabin, rather like a small amphitheatre. But tests with a mock-up produced such a negative reaction that the company dropped the technology, except for military refuelling aircraft.

Someone at Boeing must have known about passengers' vision fetish, because when airliner windows first shrank with the introduction of jets (larger windows being difficult to seat and seal in highly pressurized environments, not to mention being more fragile), means were employed to make smaller windows appear larger. These include the curving interior “frames,” lighting, and even dual windows with the window on the inside being larger than the actual exterior window. (Today, we take these features for granted and hardly notice them, except when we have to twist and turn to see the Grand Canyon or Eiffel Tower below.) Boeing apparently tried to fix things by offering passengers video images of the outside world on seatback displays, but the tryout passengers were not mollified.

There are two other problems with BWA aircraft: (1) the proprioceptive organs that provide passengers' with a sense of balance would be taken on a roller-coaster ride because of the steep turns these planes must make (a condition sure to be exacerbated by the lack of external visual references); and (2) evacuation procedures for airplane amphitheater seating have yet to be developed.

The project was scrapped (“Boeing dumps plans for super jumbo,” BBC News) and Boeing turned 180 degrees, staking its future on the more intimate but largely conventional 787 Dreamliner, with its flying efficiencies and a plethora of interior amenities. “Smaller is better” has become Boeing's design mantra (James Fallows, “The Future of Flight," TravelAndLeisure.com) despite the increase in air traffic that smaller airliners will impose on an already teetering air traffic control system. Perhaps Boeing and its partners believe that new technology can fix what already ails air traffic control and that new airports will be built (at considerable cost) to handle the load. If so, it's a race against time.

Boeing, therefore, isn't done with the BWA design all together. Boeing Phantom Works is leading development of the X-48B, a new BWA, with NASA and Boeing's research partner, Cranfield Aerospace Ltd. The 8.5-percent scale model is of a larger aircraft that purportedly could have commercial application, though the X-48B's purpose is purely for research. The scaled-down but flyable aircraft doesn't carry passengers, so they're not part of its initial design equation. If it does in the future, however, perhaps Boeing and other manufacturers will want to spend more time delving more deeply into the factors that make for passenger comfort in unconventional environments. They'll need to take a more holistic point of view when describing ”passenger comfort,“ something other than ”colors, textures, and spaciousness.“ I haven't seen signs of this development yet, but even engineers have to fly. Their subjective experiences today, and those they can imagine for future passengers, must take precedence over the more objective engineering factors that traditionally have guided aircraft design and manufacture, even before the first mock-up is experience prototyped.