Applied Design Thinking in urban air mobility: creating the airtaxi cabin design of the future from a user perspective

Abstract Design Thinking is essential for user-centered cabin design concepts in future transportation vehicles, as it facilitates the identification of user needs, creative problem-solving and iterative development to ensure optimal user experiences and satisfaction. In the exploration of future air taxi cabins, user acceptance is widely recognized as a critical factor. To ensure a high level of acceptance for such concepts, the direct involvement of potential user groups in the early design process through user-centered design approaches, offers a highly effective solution to provide a time efficient and requirement-based concept development process for novel transportation concepts. In the course of developing digital and future aviation cabin concepts at the German Aerospace Center, the exploration of user-centered and acceptance-enhancing methods plays a central role. The challenge here is to identify the flexible range of requirements of different user groups for a previously non-existent transport concept, to translate these into a concept and to generate a rapid evaluation process by the user groups. Therefore, this paper aims to demonstrate the application of the user-centered Design Thinking method in the design of cabin for future air taxis. Based on the Design Thinking approach and its iterative process steps, the direct implementation is described on the combined airport shuttle and intracity UAM concept. The main focus is on the identification of key user requirements by means of a focus group study and the evaluation of initial cabin designs and key ideas by means of an online survey. Consequently, the creative design process of a digital prototype will be presented. In addition to an increased awareness and acceptance among the population towards a novel mode of transportation, the application of the Design Thinking methodology offers a flexible and user centered approach for further testing and simulation scenarios.