Boeing Flight Deck Concept
Working with Boeing engineers, we were tasked with creating the flight deck of the future. Collaborating in small teams of graduate interaction and industrial design students, I was responsible for the design of the primary and multi-function flight displays.
Read my research review and heuristic recommendations here.
View details, diagrams, and process drawings after the jump.
Design Research
The design was based on quantitative and qualitative data gathered by cognitive psychologists, human factors specialists, and Boeing’s own ethnographer.
In addition to the design, I completed a thorough literature review and developed heuristics to address perceptual and cognitive issues in this high-risk environment.
Primary Flight Display
The flight display builds on the “six-pack” of traditional instruments, while integrating synthetic vision systems and creating opportunities for innovation based on human-centered research. The innovation of both a task list and a moving timeline. In a high-risk environment, there is a tendency for both attentional tunneling (change blindness) and a loss of prospective memory (intended tasks).
In this design, the pilot and co-pilot are able to quickly scan the timeline to identify both upcoming and completed tasks, know which pilot is responsible, and be informed of the urgency of each task.
Adding this temporal aspect to the interaction design is a solution for decreasing cognitive load.
Multi-function Flight Display
The multi-function flight display offers opportunities for communication, data collection, navigation, and troubleshooting. I developed an easily identifiable icon set, and added visual redundancy to audio information, affording more opportunities for comprehension through gesture and text.
Systems Analysis
Task Analysis
From the notebook
