Avalon Yang-Chen Hu

Design Process

Airport waiting areas are a rich resource of people, time, and boredom (wasted space!). Within airports, barriers to communication are not only due to media, but also the physical design of the place. Though there may be people around you, often a heavy pack or wheeled luggage creates a barrier between you and the next person.

To solve this, we designed round tables that have enough space below to store luggage and comfortable seats that surround the table. Though at the beginning, we might expect individuals to go after unoccupied tables (as they do now with rows of benches), eventually, seats begin to fill up and tables are filled.

While half of our team worked on the design of physical space, the others interviewed several subjects on their travel experiences. Though time was short, we tried to vary the ages and locations of interview subjects. We consolidated our findings to form an affinity wall, and picked out the most important themes to inform our design.

We also create two personas to concentrate our design.

A trip to our local art museum inspired us to create a digital display on the table that invites multiple users to view and interact. Our media projects onto the table's surface, and the arrangement of benches allows those interested to participate, watch, or do something else.

Since we are to be entertaining a wide audience, we wanted our displays to vary. We came up with ideas for several interactive pieces, but hope to invite digital artists local to each airport to design their own. We have fleshed out one such interactive design: Travel Pets.

This idea is inspired by our daily experience that pets are a good medium/ ice breaker between people. For example, people who walk on the street or in the park with dogs tend to have more opportunities having conversion and meet with new people. They are either also fond of dogs or they just want to pet the dogs. Therefore, we use the design of travel pets to help people initiate their conversation with other people while waiting at the airport.

Each traveler will be able to choose a digital pet to take with them on their travels. They choose either at the table, or set one up online. As you check in at the table, all the pets appear in the local world, and may interact with each other, perhaps prompting their owners to interact as well. Your pets will carry your travel history, showing you where you've been. They can pick up local information available at the table, and can alert you of updates to your flight's plan. Last but not least, your pets can collect souvenirs from the locations you visit, which you may later view.

Interaction Concept