Today, I’m waiting for a flight in Boston Logan airport. And for a change, I’m delighted. What is clear is that this airport has put a bit of effort into some thoughtful design. Armed with my trusty iPhone and an hour until take-off, I thought I’d share a few of the design elements of terminal E that have been pleasantly surprising.

1. Human Centered Seating
Generally speaking, seating in airports is terrible. We’ve all been stuck on old torn leather chairs in dehumanizing rows with uncomfortable leather arm rests designed to ward off delayed travellers looking for a rest. Well Logan has clearly thought about the design of its seating.

While those old friends with sharp arm rests are indeed present (and serve a necessary use), Logan clearly understands that travellers are humans, and humans interact. In addition to the uncomfortable classic, Logan has clearly examined the types positions people sit in at the airport. Ever put your feet on your travel luggage? Well they offer a slightly reclined chairs with a foot rest for the tired. Ever awkwardly sit to have a conversation with the person you’re travelling with? Well Logan has chairs in V formations that allow people travelling together to have a comfortable face-to-face conversation.

In an industry where everyone has to wait, this airport has thought about how to make waiting a little more comfortable.

2. Inviting Spaces
Travel presents a long period of maintained stress. Airports must be one of the lowest quality experiences for the money. A visit to the spa costs you a hundred bucks. Airport taxes aren’t that far off that price.

While an airport can’t necessarily fix all of the experience breakdowns of flying, Logan has created some opportunities for escapism. The airport features several spaces that allow passengers isolate themselves from other travellers to relax. Including these spaces (and offering rocking chairs) gave me the right kind of escape to work on this post.

3. Understanding the needs of the Modern Traveler
As a business traveler, I often look at the airport as my office. A few months ago, I flew out of the Buffalo airport on my way to Boston for some meetings.  As any business traveler flying in the afternoon would do, I entered the terminal and looked for the nearest plug to make sure I had enough juice for the flight. Upon further investigation, every potential outlet was covered in impenetrable metal. The only available outlets? A “Pay for Power” station offering me a charge for a charge.

Logan clearly understands that waiting is more pleasant with entertainment, and modern entertainment requires a plug. Everywhere I looked, there was a free outlet – no co-opted marketing angle, no sitting on the floor next to an outlet because there were no chairs around. Just an understanding of what people need.

4. Wi-Fi for All
In addition to the four letter words most regular travellers drop regularly while being dehumanized, we have a six letter word as well – Boingo. In a world that increasingly looks at the internet as a right not a privilege, the idea of paying $10.00 for 24 hours of Wi-Fi is insulting. Do your passengers a favour – give them a little internet access in exchange for their airport tax dollars.

Logan airport progressively offered me free Wi-Fi upon arrival (all be it, sponsored by Google).  The result? I could catch up on a bit of work and find enough time to jump on  WordPress and offer the airport my compliments. When you have a good experience, you return the favour. If anyone is reading this – connect through Logan.

Airports with empathy
Sure, not all design changes lives. But we should never forget that good experiences certainly have the ability to impact them. Designing a decent airport experience is not rocket science, and a good experience at an airport could go a long way towards helping an industry notorious for experience breakdowns.

Logan airport was certainly not perfect, but what’s obvious is that it was designed with empathy. Somehow, they’ve managed to understand traveler needs and behaviours, and support them with the best design and features they can. Logan airport tries in an industry with a terrible reputation for under-delivering on customer experience, and I can’t help but leave with a positive perspective on my visit.

Have you had a great airport experience recently? Leave a comment and let us know what made it so great for you.

Innovation is like noodle making. It is part production and part performance.  It also requires different thinking styles and switching between different ones. We respond to problems differently depending on whether our minds are in “proactive thinking” mode, “creative thinking”, “reactive thinking”, “passive thinking” and “dormant thinking” mode. We can learn to effectively by selecting an appropriate thinking pattern, responding to the purposes of thinking if we practice enough to master the skills. I remember many years back I was training a team of my top global managers. We practice business solving by forcing each of them to apply different thinking pattern to get different outcomes. It was transformative for many of these smart people. It is like discovering a new feature within a software program that you’ve been using for years. Dean Roger Martin of Rotman describes a similar concept as “Integrative Thinking”, which is the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.  Here are the for patterns that I was referring to:

“Proactive Thinking” can help is to escape from causation, which is applicable only under predictable business situations, by adopting mechanical analysis, which is the typically realized by the Lateral Thinking, the Game Theory, and Econometrics. This was my training as an economist. It is a powerful approach to use to deal with uncertain future situations. It is the most powerful pattern if we apply it in managing unknowns and create a breakthrough in stagnant situation. It is not for managing everyday repetitive tasks.

“Reactive Thinking” focuses a lot around causation, is the most efficient business thinking method under a predictable condition. This is often found in a lawyer’s mind. This is also largely the pattern of people who work in larger organizations. Reactive Thinking is powerful when we target continuous improvement I remembered when I first study the concept of “causation” in law school, I was fascinated by the application of the legal concept. In everyday business, it is about clarification of cause and effect relations of an action. It is very useful when you are dealing with marketing and operational improvement on an on going basis. Lawyers and accountants are always on this mode when they are at work.

“Passive Thinking” is the most used in our daily lives.  It is a way of organization things and we use it to only arrange information on formats passively. It is most helpful when we are dealing with massive data; Passive Thinking is very efficient in recognizing patterns and situations.  It also involves intuition and framing which are key characteristics when we try to make sense of data as a designer, engineer, market researcher, engineer or business strategist. You don’t need to look for causal relations and rely on your sensing abilities.

“Dormant Thinking” is not known within the science-based western world. Dormant means lacking activity and it means thinking without the activity of thinking. So how can one be thinking without thinking? It is used when there are over thinking. Imagine situations when the emotion overpowers the mind and we sometimes forced into reactionary mode. This is when dormant thinking is useful. Sometimes people need to meditate or in a quasi-meditation status to activate this mode. The word meditation is a very poor substitute for the original term bhavana, which means ‘culture’ or ‘development’, i.e., mental culture or mental development. The Buddhist bhavana, properly speaking, is mental culture in the full sense of the term. It aims at cleansing the mind of impurities and disturbances, hatred, ill-will, indolence, worries and restlessness, skeptical doubts, and cultivating such qualities as concentration, awareness, intelligence, will, energy, the analytical faculty, confidence, joy, tranquility, leading finally to the attainment of highest wisdom which sees the nature of things as they are. It is about bringing beauty and peace to a situation. This form of meditation, called vipassana or vipashyana, which means “insight.”  Dormant thinking is an analytical method based on mindfulness, awareness, vigilance, and observation. It is very effective. Thinking without thinking.

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