What is a user-centered airport?
French anthropologist Marc Augé worried that many spaces in our modern world were becoming non-places that lacked attachment to their local surroundings and created a disconnect for those passing through them, from cookie-cutter hotel rooms to vacuous transit halls and rootless airports that left travelers wanting more.

Recognizing this, leading airports around the world are transforming from in-between spaces, where everything feels standardized and hurried, to places of experience, where local culture is expressed and user needs are elevated. A place where a business traveler can find a workspace and a child a playground. A fast-track for people in a hurry or a quiet rocking chair for respite-seekers. For those inclined to dwell, an art exhibition or a dining experience. At Boston Logan International Airport, passengers dine on fresh fare at Legal Seafoods akin to the city’s flagship restaurant. Likewise, in Madrid’s Barajas International Airport, travelers enjoy authentic Spanish tapas like jamón Ibérico.

A user-centered airport prioritizes well-being, carefully considering how environmental conditions like light, sound and ambient quality help ease the stress of travel and elicit feelings of delight. It provides simple, intuitive signage to help people find their way. It’s a place where the physical and digital converge to extend reality, where a traveler can connect, stream, share and immerse themself. It prioritizes physical and psychological accessibility, encouraging movement and providing the right amount of space arranged in the right ways to minimize crowding and wait times.

Why should airport operators prioritize user experience through design?
User-centered design is not only a philosophy but a practical platform to cultivate positive passenger experiences and ultimately keep those airport customers coming back.

A user-centered airport is also one that delivers benefits to its operators and its community. A one percent increase in passenger satisfaction generates growth of 1.5 percent in non-aeronautical revenue on average. Retail concessions remain the largest generator of non-aeronautical revenue at 30.2 percent and are forecasted to grow globally at $26.25 billion between now and 2025. In addition to the financial boost, airports — as gateways to their communities — foster civic pride when they positively reflect their local identity and generate positive impressions to the traveling public.

How does ArchTam design airports for users?
To create spaces that elevate user experience, airport operators need a trusted partner who specializes in user-centered design and brings expertise in human behavior, well-being and environmental psychology. Over the past 50 years, ArchTam’s People + Places Advisory (PPA) has worked with a broad range of clients — transportation centers, workplaces, universities, hospitals, and stadiums — to build industry-leading capabilities in user experience that puts people at the center of design.

PPA follows a rigorous, evidence-based process to help clients shape and elevate their customers’ experiences. Our approach involves up-front visioning with airport operators and their stakeholders to determine goals and performance metrics. We then dig deeper into user needs through surveys, interviews and focus groups.

We also use a mix of engaging and interactive design thinking exercises that put designers, operators and collaborators in the users’ shoes. This includes persona development, journey mapping, design fiction, and scenario planning, to name a few. These more subjective insights are validated with hard data on airport operations and passenger needs, benchmarks, academic research, and ArchTam’s in-house expertise.

PPA partners with ArchTam’s aviation design specialists to translate airport user needs into actionable design criteria. This collaboration weaves together traditional design requirements with experiential features, resulting in spaces that meet airports’ functional demands while creating unique “wow” moments throughout passengers’ journeys.

Perhaps the best part is that our process can be easily scaled up or down depending on each client’s specific needs. Our goal is always to help airport operators explore how sociocultural, economic and technological trends intersect with aviation design. By placing the focus on the airport’s myriad users and their diverse needs, we’re building a roadmap to delivering a resilient, enduring facility — an airport that brings the future to the present by personalizing the journey from curb to gate and everywhere in between.

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Organizations around the world are now navigating a new, somewhat daunting task – how to bring employees back to the in-person workplace in ways that are safe, effective and accommodating. While it may not look the same everywhere, leading organizations are leaning into this transition by building in more flexibility and people-centric design into their workplaces. This focus is readying them to remain agile and resilient, no matter what the future brings.

Our global workplace advisory practice lead, Kelly Bacon, and workplace advisory design strategist, Nick Busalacchi, share four key points that every employer must consider in the months ahead.

Purpose-driven spaces

Changes to corporate culture and strategic investments in worker mobility have provided more flexibility for employees to work when and where they want, with many major organizations embracing hybrid work models in which employees can spend part or most of their time untethered from the physical office. This has generated a need to design diverse spaces that are better tailored to the activities workers need to perform. This means incorporating workstations and mobile technologies into the office setting that support workers’ ability to “plug-and-play”; workplaces that optimize collaboration and interaction; and regions that enable workers to move more freely among the spaces outside of the office where they can work, live and play most effectively. In our Sydney office, which is currently undergoing a major refurbishment, an entire floor will be dedicated to fostering collaboration and connection with our clients and each other — all anchored by technology. What’s more, we are aligning the office with our ESG commitments by using recycled furniture and selling excess office equipment, proving that creating purpose-driven spaces does not mean creating unnecessary waste.  

Driving social and environmental value

An indicator of a well-performing workplace is more than just the cost of space per person. Organizations that create truly successful workplaces focus on putting their employees’ needs first to generate positive returns for their company and the community. They are designing workplaces and organizational cultures with wellness in mind, including promoting greater worker flexibility, delivering workplaces that rank high in environmental quality, and extending investments into surrounding communities. The emergence of certification programs such as WELL, more comprehensive knowledge about human behavior, and tech solutions that monitor workplace performance in real-time have made wellness a central component of leading organizations’ workplace strategies.

In addition, investments in “smarter” buildings have made it easier than ever to track performance on factors such as interior environmental quality, workplace utilization, and facility sustainability. Leaders in this space are pairing this data with a sophisticated understanding of their occupants’ needs, enabling them to drive triple bottom line returns.

Organizational resilience

Smart organizations are re-orienting their cultures and their spaces to be more adaptable and resilient toward predicted or unforeseen challenges that the future may bring. These organizations are examining the way they function, working to incorporate agility into their day to day and year over year operations. Nearly 28 percent of large employers are targeting significant footprint changes in the next five years, with another 43 percent undecided.* They are doing so by encouraging greater flexibility for when and where their employees work; re-balancing their real estate portfolios to be more agile to social and economic change; and investing in spaces and systems that drive their missions, while shedding or re-purposing any excess. There is not a one-size-fits-all method or solution—leading organizations are making themselves ‘fit for the future’ by better aligning their businesses with new opportunities for agility.

Enabling systems

The way we work is not only tied to our workplaces, but also to the complex ecosystem of infrastructure networks and cultures that enable and support work and the work environment. Our evolving work structure has driven new demand in areas like transportation and utility systems, which both require a stronger focus on being more robust and adaptable. For example, the re-distribution of commuters across space and time has put new stresses on transit networks, and secure, high-speed telecommunications infrastructure has become an essential component of our increasingly mobile workforce. Regions and organizations that excel in these areas are making strategic investments in enabling infrastructure to support these demands, preparing themselves for future changes and responsibly enhancing experiences in the built environment.

In our increasingly unpredictable world, staying agile in the face of uncertainty will be the key to business success and longevity. This agility begins with a people-centered approach to workplace design and portfolio rebalancing. Organizations that embrace this approach will drive value across profit, people and planet, and create workplace investments that are fit for the future.

Read more about ArchTam’s Future of Work initiative here.

*Mercer LLC.

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