Final Product Design
"Aisle Lean Back"
"No Window Pane"
The "No Window Pane" design was made for the window seat that mimics an across-the-body seatbelt, but more pillow-like, that encourages leaning to the window.
"Middle Child"
The "Middle Child" design is for the middle seat that stabilizes the head and neck in a more locked position to prevent head bobbing and falling into other neighboring passengers space.
The "Aisle Lean Back" was designed for the aisle seat respectively. We were inspired by rollercoaster seat restraints that expand a typical neck pillow down the upper body to restrain this passenger from leaning too far to either side, while stabilizing the head and neck.
Attachment/Back and Side View
This image to the right shows the attachment mechanism for the pillow to attach to the seat head. Each pillow wraps around the headrest of the seat and is secured with a malleable band as to not block the TV (if available) of the passenger behind.
R3ST Series
Design Thinking and Doing - Spring 2021
Addressing Airplane Comfort
Project Overview
To discover a solution to a problem that people experience. To use human-centered design approaches to focus on meeting and solving users needs.
Product Description.
In order to tackle the problem of passenger discomfort during long distance travel on airlines, my team developed the "R3ST Series," a collection of three unique pillow designs for optimized plane comfort. The designs cater to the spatial limitations and problems with three different seat positions.
Team Collaborators
Brett Mayfield, Caroline Bercu, Sadd Sadd, Skye Li
Skills Utilized
Collaboration, Problem Solving, Sewing, Fabrication/Heat Press, Conducting Interviews, Conducting Primary Research Methods, Prototyping, Interpreting Data
Process
We began by conducting interviews with several college age users who are frequent flyers. We included interviews with specific outliers, such as users over the height of 6'5" with greater spatial limitations, and international travelers whose travel duration is longer, that gave us different insight. Our research on existing travel comfort products revealed an industry-wide gap in optimizing pillow shape and size. Both methods of research indicated a few key takeaways:
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Head bobbing is a major issue
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Neighboring passengers invade personal space
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Each seat position has its own unique issues
We then prototyped three separate designs, one for each seat position, to account for the variations of problems and function accordingly.
Sketching/Prototyping