Personal space when we are travelling

The recent reports of disturbances on flights where passengers have had some robust "disagreement" over reclining their seats made us think about the meaning of and need for personal and personalised space when we travel.

There is a desire to be able to adjust our seat and space to fit us and what we want to do (eat, sleep, read, etc).  This also reflects the varying sizes and shapes we come in and is part of what attracts us to our cars - the ability to adjust the seat in many different respects to accommodate us as individuals.

The problem on crowded transport is that the adjustment one person makes potentially infringes on the space of another passenger.  And social norms in this area are often not as clear and globally transferable as some people would like to think.

The response of some operators has been to remove the adjustability - especially for things like short haul flights.  This has been the norm on most trains which generally also have shorter journey times.

However, this doesn't meet our needs as passengers and doesn't match what we get in our cars when modal shift is required.  So the challenge seems to be how can adjustability be provided that doesn't affect other passengers, is reliable so seat mechanisms don't fail and can work operationally.

Whilst thinking about this piece we came across one potential answer developed by Seymour Powell - the Morph seat - which is a finalist in the Innovation by Design Awards.  It seems to tick many of the boxes although we wonder if the usual race for the arm rest might get replaced by sneeky narrowing of your neighbours seat whilst they are asleep!!

Materials, feelings and personalisation

Great piece on the Engadget website about the choice of materials for the new Samsung Galaxy S5.

Now we are going to stay away from any arguments of Samsung vs Apple.

But we thought the piece was interesting to see a view on the choice of materials and how it relates to your feelings about a product.  The metallic iPhone feels strong and robust but is perhaps less inviting. Plastics in the past have felt more flimsy but the new polycarbonates are tough and warm.

Which do you prefer?

The issue around personalisation of smartphones and other devices also suggested the driver for where we are seeing this followed through into other areas of our lives. Much of our work is in transport and we are there are very strong trends towards personalisation of experience, service and environments. This is being reflected in some of our projects looking at designing strategies for passenger experience and customer service. It's what we want, maybe the phone & tech companies started it, and it's now for other organisations to step up to the challenge.

Is the ticket dead?

The news that London Underground are to close ticket offices (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-25025888) is set to change the nature of the "ticket" and the interaction between operator and customer.

The days of the little bit of paper clutched in our hands are clearly numbered.  Tickets moving onto our smart mobile devices creates a range of opportunities to enhance the passenger experience by offering a more joined-up, journey-orientated service.

With a ticket on a smartphone, the operator knows who you are.  This could be an enabler for more personalised and individual services.  Preferences, likes & dislikes can all be remembered and bookings and offers tailored accordingly.

The operator might also know where you are.  This might allow individual travel information to be pushed to you as you enter the station - "Welcome to King's Cross, your 12.43 train to York is running 5 minutes late and will be ready for boarding in 10 minutes from Platform 6".

Knowing where you are could help eliminate the current advance booking of seats that sit empty for the journey.  The system would only allocate the seat as you enter the station.  This could also provide more flexibility for you to change seats or even change which train you are going to get.  This could be the end of the ticket barrier too - no need to go through a gate as the "station" knows that everyone on the platform is a valid ticket holder.  No more ticket inspections?  Wouldn't that be nice.

This kind of consist information could be really useful to train operators who currently have no idea who is on their train.  It can help with ensuring passengers are spread through the train and enable a range of new personalised services to be offered on-board.

The removal of the ticket office could change the nature of the interaction between passenger and staff.  The current mode is very "over the counter" and is transactional in nature.  Removing the physical separation might allow more of a personal concierge-style service to be provided which is of more value to passengers.

The only loss is the old romance of that collectable bit of paper.  But that probably disappeared long ago anyway.

Let's hope that as this technology becomes more widespread, operators take the opportunity to provide genuinely better services to passengers and do more than get rid of some staff, sell us a ticket and push loads of advertising to our phones.

Signage for me - personal navigation

A design firm in the US has produced a new signage product called Points which is connected to the internet and is a dynamic and flexible display.  It can take data from various sources including social media and then change the sign display and the direction it is pointing in response.

On the surface this seems like a bit of fun.  At the moment you can tweet the sign and shortly after your tweet appears and it will even point in the direction where you tweeted from.

However it got us thinking more about individualisation and personalisation of information. The value that we are all getting from pulling data on to our own mobile devices is that it is personalised to us and what we are doing.  Navigation information is about our route only; status updates on public transport concern only the trains or buses we are using; we can get restaurant recommendations for those that are near to our location; the list is prettty endless.

In contrast signage, by its static nature, has always been something different.  Pointing to known desinations that that majority are likely to want or points of interest determined by the local authority.

The concept of Points perhaps takes us a step closer to something in the environment that is more dynamic and responds to each of us as we approach the sign.  One could imagine having a route plugged into to Google Maps on our own device; near field technology allows the sign to detect that route and then adapts to show us the direction we want to be travelling in at that point.  There are probably a bunch of barriers to this such as how it would work in a crowded space like a railway concourse but let’s not worry to much about that for now.

Have a look.  Tweet the sign...we did...

But also think about where this could take us and what we want to support future wayfinding.