DECONSTRUCTING THE AIRPORT is a video from a New Yorker Magazine conference held in May this year.

In the video Malcolm Gladwell introduces Paco Underhill who is an architectural expert on retail space human factors design. Mr. Gladwell provides keen insight on how to remake air travel for the twenty-first century.

Paco Underhill is the architectural analog to what we in the computer industry call Human Factors or Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Basically, Mr Underhill's job is to make spaces like airports more usable and human friendly.

WATCH THIS VIDEO!

All of the videos from this New Yorker conference are excellent and available free on iTunes (look for podcasts).

A couple of easy to remember bits of information from Mr Underhill:

• Roughly 50% of people entering an airport use the potty before boarding their flight.
• On the average, it takes women longer than men to clear through the restroom.
• Men and women's restrooms generally have the same square footage. (meaning the men's room has more stations)
• Airplane potties are one of the few publicly accessible restrooms that are shared between men and women.

Mr Underhill follows up with two big questions:

• Why aren't women's airport restrooms designed to serve the same number of women per unit time as men's restrooms?
• Why aren't there seperate Men and Women's facilities aboard aircraft? Why do they have to be shared?

Mr Underhill also talks about the architectural information architecture needed for effective communications and observation in airports. Understand that different airport constituencies have different needs. Passengers, Airlines, Security, vendors, etc. Basic stuff like where is my gate, baggage claim, waiting area? Why do airports like Dublin have uncomfortable metal chairs? (I've been to Dublin and those chairs were more comfortable than padded chairs in some US airports.)

Great video. I really enjoyed it and wish all airport, airline, and security administrators would give it a view and really think about what Underhill is saying.

Don't really know why the airplane bathrooms need to be separate. They only serve 1 passenger at a time...and there aren't very many of them to begin with.

Just about all airports were constructed before 9/11 and when the number of paxs traveling was much smaller, particularly in the US.

Unfortunately, given the state of this industry, many airports now or soon be suffering from lower revenues as airlines cut flights, and inability to expand facilities (LGA, DCA) won't allow this to be remedied anytime soon.

As far as in flight, getting separate lavs is just impossible when on many narrowbodies there is only three lavs to begin with.

The women's vs. men's disparity has been talked about for years in architectural circles and is a common problem for most any public facility, but is particularly acute in facilities where usage is high (airports), usage tends to peak a certain times (stadia) or places that used to have a higher proportion of men but now are more equal (stadia and airports).

Current building codes in the U.S. require a higher number of fixtures for women than men, but only do so for certain types of buildings (among them: stadia, night clubs, places of worship). Unfortunately, airports are not one of those types, this development is relatively recent and there is no requirement to retrofit (although a sizable renovation would require an upgrade).

is anyone else getting a really choppy video stream, almost unwatchable?

Not sure I understand these two comments...having shared bathrooms decreases time spent waiting for the bathroom on the plane, which is pretty logical given that you don't want people crowding the aisles.

Most domestic U.S. F cabins have a single lav. Separate M and F lavs would require at least one of:

1. Take space away from galley and/or seats for another.
2. Share lavs with coach pax. (Practical only if there's at least one coach lav forward.)
3. Take a lav away from coach pax. (Ditto.)

None of these is going to fly. Besides, shared facilities maximize throughput because of random fluctuations leading to more M or F usage at a particular moment. If they were dedicated to one group or the other, a queue could build up for one lav while the other was idle.

(I, M, share my home lav with an F. We don't have a problem with it. I suspect most other FTers also share with the opposite sex, or did while growing up.)

Agreed. Not to mention the fact that, prior to 9/11, the preferred design was to put restaurants and retail on the land side of security rather than the airside. Now I suspect that a lot of landside retail space at airports is underutilized, as folks are generally only concerned with getting their boarding passes and through security, given the increased amount of time screening can take today. Pre-9/11, screening was pretty cursory, and I think people were more comfortable lingering landside until just prior to boarding. Not to mention all of the restrictions on taking liquids through the security checkpoint.

Slowly, I suspect will continue to see airports being redesigned or retrofitted to shift the food and beverage from landside to airside.

As long as we are on the subject...

Please give me a stall (in the airport) that's big enough to take my rollaboard and computer bag into! What, I'm going to leave my bags out in the main room? Not hardly... I feel badly when I use a handicapped stall, but in many cases it's the only option.

Or, bring back lockers inside the sterile area. Now, let me get this straight - everybody is screened airside but you can't use a locker because someone may put something that shouldn't be in the sterile area in the locker? Grrrrr.

RFTraveler

Indeed - never seen why we need separate M and F loos in public anyway.

In Thailand, there is now growing demand to provide separate lavatories in schools for transgenders, ie boys who think of themselves as girls, dress and act like girls. So, separate lavs on planes might mean having to provide for transgenders, as least on Thai Airways.

Don't forget the power receptacle and wi-fi service....

Plus ISE, the InStall version of of IFE

A couple of comments here.

First, it is transgender, not transgenders.

Second and more importantly a transgender person is not one who thinks of themselves as the opposite sex, they are a person trapped in the body of the opposite sex. (i.e. male in a female body, female in a male body). They dress according to who they are (i.e. a female even though we see a male body).

I have many friends who are transgender, none of them would say they act like girls/boys - they would say they are girls/boys (well male/female actually as they are past puberty and no longer a girl or boy)

Quite a few places in Europe don't have them. There's one main area with sinks, and individual stalls with doors going down nearly to the floor. Probably cuts down on people (mostly women) touching up their make-up, and eliminates the water savings that urinals provide, but simplifies things and as far as I can tell doesn't cause problems. (Toilets with large and small flush options can approximate the urinal water savings.)