I am writing this from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. This being the holiday season, the terminal is filled with travelers waiting patiently — or in some cases not so patiently — to get from one place to another.<\/p>\n
A surprisingly large number of people are simply standing around, just staring at the LCD monitors showing when their plane might depart. In some cases they stand there a very long time, knowing full well that their plane isn’t scheduled to arrive for another hour or more.<\/p>\n
I find myself questioning the approach we take to airport design, on a fundamental level. If you know that a significant portion of your population will be spending hours of their lives in a location, why design it to be such an “in between” place?<\/p>\n
It seems to me that airports could be thought of differently. Why not make it a place for constructive engagement? An airport could contain a library, or a problem-solving place, or a focus for community discussion or other activities.<\/p>\n
I suspect that with a little imagination, the entire experience could be turned on its head, promoted from an oddly liminal zone where chunks of life are largely wasted, to a destination in its own right, where people can go to be fully engaged with each other and with their own lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am writing this from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. This being the holiday season, the terminal is filled with travelers waiting patiently — or in some cases not so patiently — to get from one place to another. A surprisingly large number of people are simply standing around, just staring at the LCD … Continue reading “Rethinking airports”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15554"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15555,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15554\/revisions\/15555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}