Hustle & Flow »
Ed White, Alaska’s VP of corporate real estate, assembled a team of employees from across the company to design a better system. It visited theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see what it could learn. It found less confusion and shorter waits at places where employees were available to direct customers. “Disneyland is great at this,” says Jeff Anderson, a member of White’s skunk works. “They have their people in all the right places.”
The team began brainstorming lobby ideas. At a Seattle warehouse, it built mock-ups, using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts. It tested a curved design, one resembling a fishbone, and one with counters placed at 90-degree angles to each other. It built a small prototype in Anchorage to test systems with real passengers and Alaska employees. The resulting minor changes, such as moving the button that sends a bag down the conveyor belt, “increased agents’ efficiency and prevented them from straining themselves,” says Gordon Edberg, a principal at ECH Architecture who helped implement the adjustments.
The Seattle design begins with a deep lobby where 50 kiosks are pushed to the front and concentrated in banks. “You need to cluster kiosks in the ‘decision zones’ where passengers decide what to do within 15 seconds,” says airline technology expert Kevin Peterson. Alaska placed “lobby coordinators” out front, à la Disneyland, to help educate travelers. The 56 bag-drop stations are further back and arranged so that passengers can see security.
The results? During my two hours of observation in Seattle, an Alaska agent processed 46 passengers, while her counterpart at United managed just 22. United’s agents lose precious time hauling bags and walking the length of the ticket counter to reach customers. Alaska agents stand at a station with belts on each side, assisting one passenger while a second traveler places luggage on the free belt. With just a slight turn, the agent can assist the next customer. “We considered having three belts,” White says. “But then the agent has to take a step. That’s wasted time.”
The new design will create significant cost savings. Seventy-three percent of Alaska’s Anchorage passengers now check in using kiosks or the Web, compared with just 50% across the airline industry.
Spaces: compress and expand
1. In an environment, we can use the architect’s trick of compression and expansion to create drama and heighten anticipation.
2. The procession through compression and expansion makes me think of how we “breathe with a space.” We develop or adopt its rhythm, its tempo.
3. We might want to be aware of how we systematically open and close the space. Do we design it to be regular and predictable? Or, is just the opposite? Having predicibility might be a foundation for creating a sense of serentity. Introducing irregularity might help build a sense of drama and excitement.
Spaces: environmental typography and i/a
Comparing visibility of type from a distance. What things should be considered when designing an information architecture that adapts to the user’s distance, height, and eyesight? How does it respond to lighting and theatrics? To crowds?
Museum exhibit type (about 15 feet away)
Museum exhibit type (about 6 feet away)
Museum exhibit type (about 2 feet away)
Spaces: affordances and encouragement
What do locked up chairs signal? How does this change the desirability of a courtyard? Compare a Raleigh Courtyard to Bryant Park in NYC
Raleigh Courtyard / Alleyway
Here, chairs are locked up on weekends. What if, instead of buying expensive chairs that need to be locked, they bought cheap ones and left them unlocked? How might this change the use of the area? *
Bryant Park in NYC
It’s been said that this park was built around these chairs. When I was up at GEL 08, I hung out in this park for an hour one evening. Providing these chairs to passerbys—without cost!—turned this place into something very inviting.
* Of course, someone would steal them. Humor the idea though.
