Before you commission
Before you brief an airline seat designer
You have budget for a new seat or cabin and a shortlist of people who can draw one. Before the brief goes out, it is worth testing whether the seat is the thing that needs to change.
Published by leapSTONE
The brief usually names the answer
A request for seat designers has already decided the solution. A seat is a physical object, so it is easy to specify, cost and put out to tender. What passengers need from a flight is harder to pin down, so it tends to arrive in the brief as a few lines about comfort.
Passengers do not experience a seat. They experience a night.
On a long overnight flight the seat is one part of a sequence: boarding, the first hour, dinner, trying to sleep, waking up, landing. A passenger who cannot get comfortable at hour six may be struggling with the bed. They may equally be struggling with noise, light, the timing of service, or somewhere to put their things. Fix one of those and the others are still there.
What to settle before you brief anyone
- What the passenger is trying to get done during the flight, in their words rather than the cabin team's.
- Where it goes wrong today, and who in your organisation owns each of those moments.
- Which of those problems a seat can solve, and which sit with catering, crew, cabin layout or operations.
- What evidence would show the new seat worked, agreed before the money is spent.
Where this comes from
leapSTONE's founder, Neal Stone, was Head of Design at British Airways and led the team behind the world's first flat beds in business class. The work was about the whole customer experience of the flight from end to end, not the bed on its own.
What we do first
Discovery Day is one day with your team and the evidence you already hold, ending in a written view of what the real problem is. If the seat is the answer, we will say so, and your brief will be sharper for it. If it is not, you will have found that out before the tender rather than after.
Common questions
Do you design airline seats?
No. We help establish what is worth designing, then work with your teams and the specialists who build it, and hold the standard through to rollout.
Why test the brief if we already know we need a new seat?
Because the brief fixes the question for everyone who follows it. A seat project that starts from a wrongly framed problem can be executed very well and still miss. The check costs a day.
What does Discovery Day produce?
A written view of the real problem, the evidence behind it, and what to do next. If you were already solving the right problem, we will tell you that.
Who normally asks for this?
Directors accountable for a number that is not moving, such as customer experience, product or operations leaders. A chief executive or finance director is often involved once the case is clear.
Talk it through
Most people start with a conversation rather than a fixed choice. We will tell you whether this is work worth doing, and whether we are the right people to do it.
hello@leapstone.co.uk or +44 (0)1483 802862