isn't something that has been quantified, so a team of researchers at Penn State set out to measure seat accommodation.
Through the Open Design Lab, a research lab which focuses on design problems for human variability, Elizabeth Miller, mechanical engineering and Schreyer Scholar alumna, was exposed to the lack of understanding centered around airplane seat design. Miller conducted the research as an undergraduate at Penn State.
"As the world becomes more interconnected, flight is becoming more and more important to help people get to the places that they need. Currently, airplane seats have a pretty negative reputation and don't often provide quality experiences for passengers," she said.
Miller's love of travel provided her with first-hand experience of this. Being able to improve her outside passion through human-centered design research captured her attention and drove her interest in the project.
"You can ask almost anyone who travels on planes, they have probably had trouble fitting in a seat or they know someone who has," she said. "We saw that a bunch of surveys captured that people associated unhappiness, discomfort and dissatisfaction with seat size. We wanted to understand this from a quantitative perspective."
With direction from lab director Matt Parkinson, professor of engineering design and mechanical engineering, she began investigating how to measure seat accommodation and the different variables which impact it. These variables include anthropometry, or body measurements; seat dimensions; plane load factor; ratio of men to women; and clothing.
To gather body measurement data, Miller, Parkinson and Samuel Lapp, graduate student in engineering design, used one of the open design lab's most unique tools—its virtual population. This population is created using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, studies completed by the Center for Disease Control to regularly assess various health metrics of United States citizens, and an anthropometric survey of U.S. military personnel. Measurements from these surveys are pulled and processed thousands of times to create an average population that is representative of the entire U.S. population.
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