New design concept: the bare necessities.
MAY, 2020
Do you remember the song by Walt Disney movie The jungle book?
“Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife”
This is exactly what designers sometimes are called to do: improve small things of our life. Simple solutions that astonish us – the users – for its cleverness and usefulness!
In this article, we share some ideas and sketches from our first brainstorming.
NB: at this stage of the job, we never say “no”, even though most of the ideas have criticalities that later will need to be solved.
FOOD CHOICE AND DELIVERY: LET’S FIND NEW CONTEMPORARY SOLUTIONS.
Eating on airplanes is an entertaining activity, but how many times do you really eat something you like? What if the hostess delivered you the meal you ordered just before boarding?
Let’s see what we could change to make this come true.
The “robogalley”
This idea involves both product and service design: we are thinking of creating an automatic and on-demand food preparation system, which starts in the cargo area: a sort of robotized vending machine will manage food preparation and storing.
Trolleys will be auto-filled with passengers’ purchased items, while a display will help the attendant to deliver the right items to the passengers.
Bye bye cabin galleys: it’s time for galley sliding rail!
Have you ever been to a food rail restaurant in Japan? This is how it works: you order at your place’s tablet and the meal comes on a cart running on small rails.
We could think to have the same system in aircrafts: this way the standard trolley will disappear.
What about lavatories?
Lavatories are never such agreeable places in aircrafts, quite narrow and after a few hours of flying not so clean, isn’t it?
Different cultures and genders expressed very different needs (or let’s say pain points) regarding toilets matters. Let’s see two possible solutions.
Splitted/compact lavatories
The idea here is to organize the aircraft space to have two different lavatories: one will be equipped with a water closed and basin and the other one is equipped with urinal and a basin.
A collapsible touch less self-cleaning system grants the maximum level of hygiene to travellers.
Lavatory booking app
Standing in front of the toilet is quite annoying and also not so good for safety. Passengers could book the service directly from an app (on their mobile or directly on the passenger service unit), showing them the average waiting time. A push notification will tell the users when they should approach the lavatory.
A small thing that might not change life, but make it a bit more comfortable, funny and easy, don’t you think?!
Here we finish with our first round of brainstorming: stay tuned, because at the moment the Ratios project is entering the most interesting phase: which concepts are feasible? Which ones will be implemented? Stay tuned to discover more! 🙂
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