Applied Design Thinking in urban air mobility: creating the airtaxi cabin design of the future from a user perspective

Abstract

Design Thinking is essential for user-centered cabin design concepts in future transportation vehicles, as it facilitates the identification of user needs, creative problem-solving and iterative development to ensure optimal user experiences and satisfaction. In the exploration of future air taxi cabins, user acceptance is widely recognized as a critical factor. To ensure a high level of acceptance for such concepts, the direct involvement of potential user groups in the early design process through user-centered design approaches, offers a highly effective solution to provide a time efficient and requirement-based concept development process for novel transportation concepts. In the course of developing digital and future aviation cabin concepts at the German Aerospace Center, the exploration of user-centered and acceptance-enhancing methods plays a central role. The challenge here is to identify the flexible range of requirements of different user groups for a previously non-existent transport concept, to translate these into a concept and to generate a rapid evaluation process by the user groups. Therefore, this paper aims to demonstrate the application of the user-centered Design Thinking method in the design of cabin for future air taxis.