Travel is like time travel.
Traveling into the past and the future.
The science fiction writer William Gibson famously said: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” (1)
As business leaders and innovators we must keep our finger on the pulse of time, notice early signals of change that might affect our organizations and use those signals to create new products and services. Travel is one way of helping us explore the future and see signals outside our normal filter bubble.
Today, I am traveling to Mexico City from Berlin Germany. First stop: The Airport.
The BER airport in Berlin Germany opened many years late and over budget. And today’s experience feels like traveling into a far gone past. Try charging your phone… cafes and seating areas lack power sockets. Instead you can find power towers – a charging pillar close to a wall or window with a multitude of chargers and 6–8 people huddled around it to keep an eye on their personal device, while charging it.
This is a great design decision, if you want to create chance encounters between people, foster new connections and start conversations.
This is not such a great design decision, when people are traveling. Where the masses of passengers are already overwhelming, people are being herded from one holding area to another, and all they want to do is to sit down and relax for a moment.
Douglas Adams helps me see the comedy in tragedy, when experiencing the many airports across the world. He wrote:
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘as pretty as an airport.’ Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk.” – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
For time travel into the future, the airport Berlin Tegel shines as an example. It recently closed its runways, so that the supposedly modern and larger BER could replace it. People loved Tegel airport – calling it lovingly „Tegelchen“ (2). (And some hated it due to noise and air pollution. But that is another story.)
Its futuristic design still won architecture prizes, just a few years before its final closure (3). But more interestingly, its experience design is a glimpse into a desirable future. It was called a “drive-in airport” due to its hexagonal shape which enabled passengers to drive directly up to the gate with their car or taxi. For every gate there was a distance of only around 35 meters from the car to the airplane (4). Form follows function. Paths around the airport were short and clear (5).
A friend of mine prided themselves on being able to leave the center of Berlin 45 minutes before the plane’s departure, and making it in time.
In contrast, todays considerations that go into airport design have shifted. The experience of the new BER airport in Berlin and many others around the world are centered around the concept of a shopping mall with kilometer long paths to the plane. There has been a shift away from helping passengers to reach their destination quickly and conveniently towards holding them hostage in endless mazes of duty free ailses until they buy something (6).
Finally, travel is a powerful method. When it is paired with active observation and looking for signals, we can spot shifts and changes that are occurring in the market and with customer behavior. This enables us to bring new ideas into our organisations to create innovation, but also to make organisations more resilient and prepare and shape new futures that are evolving.
What about you? How do you expose yourself to signals of possible futures? How do you keep up with shifts in market and customer behavior? How do you capture inspiration for innovation?
References:
(1) The Economist, December 4, 2003
(2) Der Flughafen Tegel - Buchbesprechung.
(3) 42 years of Tegel Airport: B.Z. tells the story (in German)
(4) A building with history: Tegel Airport (in German)
(5) 42 years of Tegel Airport: B.Z. tells the story (in German)
(6) 99% Invisible. Episode 32. Design for Airports. And A building with history: Tegel Airport (in German)
(7) Photo of Tegel Airport from book: TXL. Berlin Tegel Airport by Jürgen Tietz.
(8) Photo of DeLoerean by Alex Shuper on Unsplash
All online links accessed 30th December 2022.
