FUCAM

Project Coordination / Concept Design

project overview

FUCAM is a 3-year EU-Japan collaborative project gathering the significant expertise of 9 research and industrial partners from 6 European countries and from Japan. The core competence of the FUCAM team originates from the fact that its members represent the entire value chain when designing a new cabin or cabin interiors, from very upstream research to industrial end product.

The main objective of the FUCAM (Future Cabin for the Asian Market) project is to develop a conceptual cabin design for the aircraft of the future (after 2025) tailored to the Asian market, and different from the worldwide standard cabin of today. The FUCAM project analyzed the operator and user requirements of airlines and passengers in the Asian markets of Japan, China and South-East Asia. In parallel, FUCAM established a panorama of innovative cabin technologies emerging in Europe and Japan. Based on these inputs, a cabin scenario was composed providing innovative concepts for high density seat layouts and dedicated seat solutions on the main deck, combined with extra offers on the lower deck.

Concept development for premium class seats

Over the 3 years, user experience research, concept ideation and prototyping was conducted to develop cabin concepts.

From research, I gained the following findings;

• Mid-haul flights will become a growing market in 2025

• Lead-user segments in Japan mentioned ‘privacy’ and ‘customizability’ as key elements of comfort

• Especially on mid-haul flights, multi-usability is key to satisfy passenger activities

By synthesizing these findings, I designed the Za-Isu seat. It is a premium class seat concept inspired by a Japanese relax chair (Zaisu) focused on enabling ‘multi-usability’ during mid-haul (4-5 hour) flights while optimizing the space and product maintenance for airlines.

In a mid-haul flight, passengers may want to take a meal, take a nap, watch movies or work on their laptops. Za-Isu Seat serves passengers different seating positions which allows them to do various tasks, while eliminating heavy reclining mechanisms.

Project Coordination

To effectively share learnings and develop concepts, meetings were organized every 3 months of the duration of the project. Workshops with airlines and passengers in Japan were also be conducted throughout research and evaluation phases. As project partner in Japan, I coordinated with airlines, facilitated workshops and secured locations to conduct meetings.

As representative of the FUCAM team, I also attended the FTE Asia Expo in 2017 and 2018 to introduce the project to the public audience and gain feedback from airlines.

The Process

As concept designer and coordinator, I made sure to synthesize the findings from research conducted both by Japan team and EU team, and to reflect them into the final design proposal.

links

FUCAM Website: http://www.fucam-project.eu/