Long Haul Seating.
Client: Air New Zealand.
This was one of those rare projects that comes along every now and again where the client challenges you to deliver a revolution rather than an evolution in design. It’s fair to say that apart from improvements in in-flight entertainment, little had changed in the passenger experience for economy class long haul flights for a very long time. The objective of this project was to disrupt the current market with some genuine innovation in economy class.
My experience of long haul economy is that there’s nowhere to stretch out, and you’re frequently having to get up to let other passengers in and out of their seats. I also find the shared ownership of armrests a nuisance. My approach was to take a step back and consider the needs of the individual from an anthropometric and psychological point of view to address these problems.
Staggered LOPA Trial
Staggered LOPA Model
While playing around with simple post-it note representations of seated passengers, I came to the realisation that a staggered seating arrangement fore to aft with laterally overlapped armrests fixed these issues. If the pitch were such that there was room to turn the seats around to also face backwards, the end result was an economy density cabin where fully 50% of the passengers had completely unlimited leg room, nobody had to share arm rests, nobody had to get up to let other passengers in or out, and the passengers had the freedom to create their own intimate social clusters of friends or family travelling together by turning seats around into seating circles.
This seemed to me to be the breakthrough Air New Zealand were after, and it did result in a patent application by the client.
Role: Design Camp participant and inventor of the Staggered LOPA Concept.
Tasks: Conceptual design work.
Staggered LOPA Plan