Connecting through Heathrow

Engine is helping BAA to develop its service for passengers connecting through Heathrow Airport. You can see our work on the official BAA Heathrow website.

One third of Heathrow’s passengers use the airport as a transfer hub. For BAA, providing a good experience for connecting passengers is important for both revenue and for the competitiveness of Heathrow in Europe. The opening of Terminal 5 and major remodelling of the other terminals over the next few years has given BAA a great opportunity to look at the experience for the one third of connecting passengers. BAA asked Engine to work with them to develop a service experience for connecting passengers.

The design team spent time walking and mapping the routes between terminals in Heathrow and speaking to the staff who are responsible for looking after passengers connecting through the airport. We reviewed BAA’s research which included extracts from interviews with connecting passengers. From here we developed a very simple structure with which to represent different types of connecting passenger and their needs. We developed a set of core needs that provided the basis for the service design principles that would guide our design thinking.

As much of the current interior architecture is to be remodelled we devised a generic transfer journey based of real spaces in the airport that connecting passengers typically pass through. We used this as scaffolding on to which we were able to develop and visualise the Connections brand.

The key deliverable for the project - in the first phase - has been a visual brand and a set of service design principles packaged into a Design Handbook for use by terminal project teams. The visual brand and handbook have been developed to provide design solutions for wayfinding, the interior design of spaces along the connections journey through the airport and an identity for communications design.

The handbook provides explanation, guidance and ideas for implementation of the scheme covering, for example, colour and materials palettes, the design and placement of graphic elements, furniture, the use of images, the role of staff and the use of language.

We’re now working with the project managers, architects and a manufacturer on the implementation of the Connections scheme. The next phase of work will involve the design of information services for connecting passengers.