Economy Seats of the Future? Pay for Space, Not a Seat…

by Adam

Are these the economy seats of the future? Will you be paying or using miles for space and not a seat? British design firm Seymourpowell has a seating concept called the Morph and they strongly believe that it’s coming to the back of your future flight. “Passengers who can afford premium, business or first class have a choice and hence some control over their own experience,” says Seymourpowell’s head of transport Jeremy White. “Morph is a solution – a standard product that meets the needs of lots of different kinds of people. The pitch is simple: Morph can, quite literally, morph to best serve those who are using it.”

The Verge gives a preview of the Morph:

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Rather than a trio of individual seats, each made of several pieces of fabric and foam, Morph is better described as a bench. A single piece of fabric is stretched across to form the seats, and another forms the back of the chair. The individual seats are designated using armrests and dividers to clamp the fabric in place.
Instead of moving the entire seat back to adjust the pitch of the chair, mechanized seat formers are positioned under the fabric, allowing users to decide the recline and support that best fits them.

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By moving the dividers that define each seat, airline staff can effectively tailor each bench for its occupants. All three seats take up 54 inches of width — a fairly standard economy bench size. When shared between a trio of passengers, that offers 18 inches each. However, there are times when we don’t require three equal seats.

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Check out The Verge for full details on the Morph.

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3 comments

Graydon December 13, 2013 - 4:44 pm

Um…. no?

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BOShappyflyer December 14, 2013 - 7:40 am

A second no. Seat space in economy are really tight as it is. Just because I am a bit smaller in size does not mean I need less space (I’m mildly claustrophobic too).

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youzizz November 19, 2019 - 2:29 pm

The airline cabin of the future may not only be more social for business class fliers, though. Lionel Ohayon, founder and CEO of New York-based design firm Icrave, believes that airlines will try to end the anxiety over who you ll sit next to on a flight in economy by creating mini social networks where passengers can scout out people who have similar interests and request to be seated next to like-minded passengers. He believes these kinds of online social groups might lend themselves to people meeting in airports and on the plane itself something the startup Planely has tried to do, with apparently limited success. It might take a lot more than a social network to get people to actually talk to each other in the enclosed space of an airplane cabin.

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