Following on from Pixel City I began considering other problems I’ve experienced whilst visiting another city, and considered how a travel company could try to solve these problems as some sort of promotion.  I came up with idea of expanding the usage of the in-flight screens  which are now on all Virgin Altlantic flights.  I wanted to make the screens useful to what the passengers would need, as well as a source of entertainment.

Way-finding system to allow you to plan your journey from the airport to your destination.

Basic route map view.

Arrival map view, with nearby landmarks highlighted to help you recognise the location.

Sky Camera and Flight Tracking, viewable to side-to-side to enhance perspective.

The original idea for this came from Hi-Res!’ Meet Your City website for Nokia.  When I’m going to a new city I always trawl through endless lists on websites beforehand, to find out where to go out and where the good shops are.  Timeout guides are great for general information, but I’ve lost count of the times I’ve tried to go to a club they’ve recommended and its shut down.  The best I’ve found is superfuture, but you still have to go through all the links to find exactly what you want.  (They do have a new ‘megasite’ in construction though, so maybe this will improve things.)

The idea is that you select options from the submenu to specify which venues show up, for example you might what to find a moderately priced club that plays dance music and serves real ale (although I doubt there would be many results for that!).

Something that I am considering at the moment is how this could include user input, superfuture listings can be added by users.  The problem with this would be that it would rely on users inputting correct information in to all of the categories.  There could be a community side to the site, and some entries could be filtered through to the main page.

Allows you to physically stick notes on (magnetic might not be possible, some sort of moveable clips?  or post its?), write on with removable ink and upload images from the internet or your computer.

Could also be a better way to visualise e-cards - friends could send stuff directly to the screen.

Waitrose* is known for locally sourcing food, and with topical concerns about how far our food travels, I felt it could offer customers more information about the actual farms its products are produced at.

Customers would be able to select their local store and choose a product, to track exactly where it comes from.  This could also encourage customers to select more locally sourced food over their usual choice.

*could also be applied to Booths or the Co-op

Thinking about how information could be viewed more physically and intuitively, I began to consider how we select and filter through information online.  Rather than navigating through menus or clicking ‘next’, it could be possible to move through the options with our hands as in the real world.

This could be done with some sort of physical object, possibly with some sort of origami-like folds that could be undone and played around with to access different pages.