User Interface Engineering

Boeing unveiled a new addition to its fleet of commercial aircraft on Sunday, called the 787 Dreamliner. The plane promises high fuel-efficiency, longer travelling distances, more cabin space, bigger windows, softer lighting that adjusts with the time of day, and increased in-flight humidity for greater passenger comfort. Where did all of these innovative features come from? They came from intensive user research that dove directly into the passenger experience.

John Barratt, CEO of Teague, the firm that designed the interior for Dreamliner, sat down with Marco van Hout of Design & Emotion this past January to discuss the philosophy behind Teague’s design and research approaches, and discusses the inspiration for the new interior design of the plane.

The new interior design for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner was done by Teague. First of all, let me congratulate you and the Teague team on that, it looks like something completely out of the ordinary airplane interiors. Real amazing stuff. In a quote I found as an introduction to your speech at the DMI conference you stated the following:

“Passenger well-being, on both an emotional and physical level, relies heavily on collaborative and research-orientated design practices. In designing the highly-anticipated 787 Dreamliner, Teague and Boeing employed a variety of design research techniques to determine the needs and desires of commercial travellers the world over. Defining and responding to the collective needs and desires of air travellers fueled the design process, permitting new, unconventional ideas to flourish and succeed in an industry renowned for strict standards. The results surpassed expectations”

Could you explain to us a bit about this high profile project by Teague? I have also been wondering, the expectations you mentioned, were they based on travelers experiences? In which way have you made sure that passenger well-being as you said, was secured on both an emotional as a physical level?

Again, understanding and responding to unarticulated needs was key. It’s easy to react to what’s in front of you, a finished product, but what if the average consumer was in charge of creating the ideal product – what would that be, what would that look like? That’s what we aimed to do, to determine and respond to that ideal. Of course a lot went into that, this particular project had a global audience and had to translate accordingly. We endlessly validated and iterated full scale models, we sent teams across the globe in flight to directly connect to the current experience, we employed new research techniques across cultures, engaged in cross-team integration….we considered every single element that consumers would come in contact with, and we did it persistently with passion over a period of many years. It’s impossible to properly explain the process in a paragraph – basically we established a new wholly collaborative process and did that by organizing an amazing group of talent that was driven to design a product that was created expressly for the end user. We aimed not for our own ideal, but for the consumer’s ideal, a challenge to say the least, certainly the road less traveled, but what an incredible journey!

You can read the entire interview here: Getting Emotional With John Barrat.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Design, Events, Experience Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.