‘Future aircraft cabins and design thinking: Optimisation vs. win-win scenarios’

This research was based on findings from two academic-commercial collaborations between the Innovation Design Engineering programme at the RCA/Imperial College London and Airbus Operations GMBH. The project was developed and managed by Hall, who led a number of interdisciplinary Masters’ teams exploring new concepts for aircraft cabin interiors for the year 2030. The initial broad design research was developed into a second, more focused project around a single design solution that was 3D computer-modelled and finite-element analysed (FEA), and a rapid prototype of a fuselage section was made. During the research a combination of the project findings and a number of significant conversations led to new thinking about how the aircraft industry deals with innovation. Hall’s paper makes a fundamental challenge to the existing engineering optimisation approach and instead proposes abductive reasoning through a win-win consumer-driven design method, and presents this in a new model that privileges customer-driven innovation over parameter optimisation. The research team travelled to the Airbus headquarters in Hamburg to present the final design in an immersive virtual reality environment. Innovative design solutions were achieved by using FEA analysis in conjunction with Voronoi algorithms to generate a biomorphic structure. The research contributed to the new Airbus concept cabin animation, publicly launched in 2011 and constructed as a full-size model. It also established the strategic challenges facing lock-out industries from the penetration of digital communication platforms. The research was published as a journal article for Propulsion and Power Engineering (2013) and presented at the 4th International Symposium on Jet Propulsion (2012). A limited description of project activity is included owing to commercial non-disclosure agreements currently in place. Hall also ran two commercial projects with Airbus to design a new aircraft fuselage for the year 2030