Gillian Crampton Smith: Virtual Airport Design Scenarios

What I am going to show you was done at the RCA by a team led by Fiona Raby, and one of the team, Sally Barton, is out there in the dark there.

The air traveller today is not a very relaxed person. It should be speedy, it should be easy, but instead it makes him anxious - about missing the plane, having forgotten some vital thing, will he miss the flight call, when they arrive will he know what to do? He is uncomfortable, psychologically as well as physically. The journey is fragmented; waiting here, queuing there, bland entertainment, flickery video, but above all he is dislocated.

Scientists like Hubert Dreyfus have discovered something they call 'situated understanding', that is a clear mental picture of the artificial environment around us is important for mental health.

John Thackara pointed out in his essay Lost in Space that in airports we are separated from the natural rhythms of light and time, 'lived time' as the philosopher Bergson has called it. We feel like a package, being parcelled and processed and popped out at our destination.

Compare this, though, with the experience of international train travel. You go to the station in the centre of the town, you put your luggage on the train where you can see it and you know that, as long as you are on the right train, you are alright. Like an expert masseur, who never lifts both hands from the body, the train draws you through your journey, keeping you in touch with the time and the territory that you pass through.

We propose to use the Internet throughout our travelers journey, through information, to parallel their journey through space and time. So the virtual museum of the skies aims to connect this to the time and territory you fly through; instead of dislocating us, to relocate us, to give us a scense of our journey, our arrival, with pleasure.

This is a diagram of the earth and its atmosphere. Imagine our plane on its journey from Tokyo to London. As it travels over the earth through the atmosphere, under the heavens, past whatever earthly trespassers there might be there: satellites, space stations, astronauts, - and astro-nerds - we also know at any point in time exactly where our plane is along its journey. And as it goes, it intersects with other trajectories of time and place, below on the earth and above in space. And as it intersects with points of information they can be gathered up and, according to the traveller's desire, watched as continuous flows of images, or caught and investigated further.

This is Hurricane Fran, a storm that hit Florida recently:
There is a huge range of information being sent by equipment all around us. Most of it is accessible on the Internet or via airwaves. This is the world of aviation, air traffic zones, radar spaces, satellite orbits. There are views of the globe or we could look up into space. These are pictures from the Hubble telescope.

As well as natural information, there is information from what we call 'leaky cities', public commercial news, CamWats, and as we fly over a large city, we can have a sense of not just of its urban form, but of what animates its people.

Of course, natural sources are not the only information possibilities along the journey. Cultural elements could also be treated; we could read short stories set in the countryside we pass over, films, music photographs could all be related to our route.

So could it all work? In the plane today there is already the equipment you need to access the Internet. We envisage a system comprising an editorial team and central computer. The computer sends out agents to gather information about places on the routes of the planes. This information is assessed by the editorial team and compiled for downloading as the plane loads.

Stable information can be stored on CD-ROM and reside permanently on the plane. Fluid information like news and reviews could be downloaded as the plane loads. Live information: air traffic control, weather - conversations with astronauts, for instance, could be fed-in as the journey progresses.

Of course the kind of information collected would not have to be limited to viewing on board. It could also be viewed as people wait to take off or waiting for their friends to arrive.

Nor of course do we have to be at the airport itself. You could imagine people at the KLM 'urban plane spotters' cafe in the centre of the city, sampling virtually the journeys of all the travellers passing over their heads.