Exploring a touch-based flight control panel for pilots using tangible design principles

Touch technologies tend to replace the existing pilot-system interfaces in airliner cockpits. The use of touch screens offers many advantages for pilots and manufacturers. However it also presents major potential risks for air safety. In this paper, we explore the design space of future touch-based flight control panels for aircraft pilots. We attempt to design gestures that are more physical and robust in unstable conditions and require less visual focus, based on directional gestures and layouts that leverage spatial and proprioceptive skills. We observed the use of the control panel during a real flight in turbulent conditions. This let us explore the limits of touch-based interaction techniques in degraded contexts of use and to explore how tangible properties found in tangible and embodied interaction could help design these gestures. This also let us better understand the blurred frontier between touch-based and tangible interaction, and to reflect on interaction design principles in degraded contexts through the iterative building of an explicit design space.