The Air Travel Design Guide

An online guidebook for airport stakeholders, designers, and air travel enthusiasts, which describes the design of artifacts, spaces, and systems that impact the passenger experience of air travel.

Illustrations: Isa He
UX Design + Webmaster: Isa He

Researchers: Allen Sayegh (PI), Humbi Song, Zach Seibold, Isa He, Jan Kwan, Oliver Luo

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Introduction 

<www.airtraveldesign.guide> is an online guidebook for airport stakeholders, designers, and air travel enthusiasts, which describes 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.

The goal is to facilitate a rethinking of how to design objects, spaces, and systems by putting the human experience at the forefront.

The Air Travel Design Guide website is a 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.

Together, they represent the culmination of the first phase of research within the Future of Air Travel project (an LDT focus project) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.