Premium economy seat
This airplane seat is designed to improve the premium economy class experience. The design focuses on comfort: a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint.
It has a redesigned seat-pan and back-rest that more closely follows the body, improving overall comfort. We achieved this by incorporating the actual human contour, derived from 3d scans of the contour of multiple people.Additionally, the seat has a moving mid-piece that improves sideways sleeping comfort. The mid-piece provides support and a space for the user’s shoulder.
The seat design offers Zodiac Aerospace two new and unique design elements they may incorporate in future seats.
Our vision was to make sideways sleeping comfortable too. It is important, because sleeping is a frequent activity in airplanes and about 70% of people prefer to sleep on their side. Our eventual solution is simple: the middle part of the back-rest is a movable cushion, creating space for your shoulder and a support for your lower back.
We combined several scans by projecting a grid of points onto the scanned surfaces, averaging the resulting grids for multiple scans and then converting the result into a surface. This resulted in a generic contour that we further tweaked based on usage research.
In order to achieve a "welcoming" experience we used user research to determine seat shape and provide some ideas and recommendations on colours and materials.
The result of various studies, including multiple partial seat and contour prototypes, was captured in a complete prototype to compare with the original seat.