In an earlier life, I had quite an interest in aircraft, to the point of studying it at university in the form of Aerospace Engineering.
In what now seems like a parallel life, the UK joined up with other major European nations to form an aircraft manufacturer to compete with the big American ones.
Airbus was to be, and had to be, disruptive within the industry in order to compete effectively. Airliners have one major differentiator which is their width - wide-body have two aisles and narrow-body just the one[1]. In 1987, Airbus created a portfolio of aircraft offerings with the launch of the narrow-body A320[2] which was wildly successful and integrated advances in digital communication to use a fly-by-wire system that allowed the plane to be controlled by fewer people and with a small side-stick rather than a hulking great yoke. What was different about this new plane to the previous wide-body planes was obvious and this could definitely be considered disruptive[3] in a positive sense. Disruption is kind of fun but it should lead somewhere. The A320 was successful and that meant some demand for some slight differences leading to the A321, A319 and A318 - even named as derivatives of the original - which were added to the portfolio.
The differences were obvious from the outside but the similarities were not. From the inside, the similarities were obvious yet the differences were not.
What Airbus decided to do was introduce the concept of commonality into their operations and by sharing large parts of the cockpit, from the pilot's perspective, with different planes, a new plane became instantly familiar. Flying a plane (like many things such as rally driving: see some casual skill here), is both trivially simple and also hugely complex at the same time depending on your skill level and experience. Shared design allows you to draw on your previous, similar, experience - at work we often call them transferable skills. I’m no longer in the careers that I have passed on, but there are plenty of skills that I picked up that I have transferred over - skills are transferred to people, not to jobs.
To that end, pilots flying Airbus planes can fly other Airbus planes with “Cross Crew Qualification” that gives training to fly any aircraft within the family. This has large savings of time and cost for running an airline with multiple types of planes - the portfolio[4] of planes of traditional carriers, such as British Airways, is quite broad.
Modular design is a time saver, things slot in and out saving the time and efforts of redesign. Any redesigns can be slotted into multiple products so designers can spend their time on something else. Truly modular design is very difficult but now most often seen, but not necessarily appreciated, within computer design. When you open a file in one bit of software, that file open screen is usually the same across multiple bits of software. Why waste time writing an “open file” screen when there is a perfectly serviceable one that you can latch onto?
Good design is rarely about saving the designer time, it should be about how the design works in active use and modular design ends up saving the user time too. Whilst true that familiarity can breed contempt, it is also quicker to pick something up when it is familiar - to the point where you may not even consider it “picking something up”. I rarely get shown how to open files in new software, for example, yet it is theoretically a new task each time.
Flying a plane effectively also depends on understanding the often huge amounts of feedback that a control panel is giving you. There is a question of how much information that you need at a time and how much is ignored (active and passive ignorance being different things) which is why there used to be a larger crew with a flight engineer to help with swimming in that information. With a truly reductive approach, everything that we do is a binary choice of either doing it or not within a sort of decision tree and a well-designed panel can do the simple thinking for you to leave the complex stuff for those with complex brains - humans. The Airbus approach here took those dials and meters and decided to light them only when they were needed which both hides the irrelevant and accentuates the relevant.
As thoughts of UI and UX seep into normal conversations, mainly as a result of the pervasiveness of smartphone design, it is worth thinking about the end user for things we design at work. Even if they aren't aeroplanes. What can be added or taken away to streamline things to a common flow? What is necessary right now and what is not?
That “Airbus” approach, as I like to think of it, is really a defining point of my attempts at work (and sometimes outside too) and we should strive to achieve a common language, even if we do not have the same output. Not only is that shared culture more enjoyable, it is also much easier to switch from one to another if you can find the common threads that bind different elements. The common threads that bind us together.
1. The body distinction usually corresponds to distance but not always as some Asian carriers can use wide-body planes such as the 747 for short flights where the market dictates and BA offer a flight to New York from London on an A318! Airbus, as would seem sensible, started with one model and although some of the philosophy around design were different to Boeing planes at the time, as a first foray that is what you'd expect. ↩
2. The first commercial Airbus, the wide-body A300 was introduced in 1974 and was fairly unremarkable but gave a sign of how collaboration across national borders could work. The bulk of the orders for the A300 were from countries that had a stake in production so it was not as successful as hoped but a lot had been learned. The 1982 launched A310 was released as a derivative of the A300 - in many ways a more refined, but slightly different, version that saw a much more marketable product. First, competence was proven but the A310, as a second product was less risky for the buyer. ↩
3. Modern companies, usually American tech companies such as UBER and Amazon, are often called disruptive when they enter a market and change it in some way fundamentally. They often do this by breaking the laws of the land and losing a lot of money - but having the capability to lose money that their competitors do not. It also helps if you do not have to pay too much tax and you get government assistance.”Amazon was founded in 1994, first traded publicly in 1997, and didn’t turn a profit until 2001” Amazon Never Makes Money But No One Cares | Investopedia ↩
4. The lack of variability in planes is actually one of the major reasons that low-cost carriers are able to run so efficiently. This makes all parts, human or not, within the process chain interchangeable. Having a warehouse full of parts for multiple planes is much more expensive than lots of parts for one plane. It also means each aircraft can replace another quite directly if necessary.↩
1. The body distinction usually corresponds to distance but not always as some Asian carriers can use wide-body planes such as the 747 for short flights where the market dictates and BA offer a flight to New York from London on an A318! Airbus, as would seem sensible, started with one model and although some of the philosophy around design were different to Boeing planes at the time, as a first foray that is what you'd expect. ↩
2. The first commercial Airbus, the wide-body A300 was introduced in 1974 and was fairly unremarkable but gave a sign of how collaboration across national borders could work. The bulk of the orders for the A300 were from countries that had a stake in production so it was not as successful as hoped but a lot had been learned. The 1982 launched A310 was released as a derivative of the A300 - in many ways a more refined, but slightly different, version that saw a much more marketable product. First, competence was proven but the A310, as a second product was less risky for the buyer. ↩
3. Modern companies, usually American tech companies such as UBER and Amazon, are often called disruptive when they enter a market and change it in some way fundamentally. They often do this by breaking the laws of the land and losing a lot of money - but having the capability to lose money that their competitors do not. It also helps if you do not have to pay too much tax and you get government assistance.”Amazon was founded in 1994, first traded publicly in 1997, and didn’t turn a profit until 2001” Amazon Never Makes Money But No One Cares | Investopedia ↩
4. The lack of variability in planes is actually one of the major reasons that low-cost carriers are able to run so efficiently. This makes all parts, human or not, within the process chain interchangeable. Having a warehouse full of parts for multiple planes is much more expensive than lots of parts for one plane. It also means each aircraft can replace another quite directly if necessary.↩
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