Mood-driven research for improving passenger entering experience: airplane entryway design suggestions for passengers in different moods

Mood-driven research for improving passenger entering experience: airplane entryway design suggestions for passengers in different moods

Kim, C.M.

Desmet, P.M.A. (mentor)
Tsaj, W.J. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design for Interaction

2016-09-14

‘ How to enhance the entering experience of various passengers.’ Crowds of passengers have different moods and expectations. Although the importance of the entering experience has been shown in previous research (Ahmadpour, Robert & Lindgaard, 2014a; Vink, 2014), there is yet to be a product or service designed that focuses on this. In the current boarding process, passengers share a similar entering route and routine. Moreover, cabin crews are busy working on service preparation or scanning for safety reasons. Passengers might not have a warm welcome and they could even have feel as if they are entering through the back door of a restaurant. Therefore, research on how to enhance the entering experience of various passengers will be an opportunity for stakeholders to improve the product and/or service where there have been blind spots. Moreover, as a design approach, mood-driven design can have its influence verified through this case study. Afterwards, the range of the scope could be widened to the entire flight experience. One’s experience can be influenced by several factors, and mood plays an import role. Understanding what the factors are that have an effect on one’s mood, how it transitions from one to the other, and how to stimulate such mood is required. For understanding the current entering experience, firstly literature research was conducted for understanding the trends in the air travel industry and analyzing various types of passengers and flight user experiences. Then empirical research was done on passengers in the given context in order to identify their concerns and moods. Various methods including mood measurement tools such as Pick-A-Mood was used. After a pilot test, the main passenger research was conducted with 30 participants. For this phase, participants were provided by the commercial partner, Boeing. As a result of this phase, an understanding of passengers’ current boarding experience, mood transition, internal and external factors that influence this, and what passengers consider an ideal boarding experience was gained. For the relationship between mood and contextual factors, all contextual factors in the flight that can affect mood were analyzed, and research was carried out on how these factors can be used to form ‘the mood for the ideal experience’. Empirical research methods were used for this phase. Lastly, in the design phase, based on findings from the research phase, the vision for the boarding experience and several inspirational concepts were carried out as design applied case. During this phase, an evaluation of the concepts suggested was conducted.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8918df92-2425-427e-91e0-0b62576f4f43

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016, Kim, C.M.