Becoming a passenger: exploring the situational passenger experience and airport design in the Copenhagen Airport

This paper develops the analytical framework of Becoming a Passenger to offer a new vocabulary for analysing the situational passenger experience in the Copenhagen Airport. This knowledge will shed light on the development of design guidelines for decision-making, particularly in the fields of mobilities and urban design, to improve passenger experiences and airport operations beyond a functionalistic, an efficient and economic approach. Becoming a passenger is defined as process + experience. Empirical analyses through this framework show specific mobile situations that support the new vocabulary added to understand passenger experience and reveal which spatial conditions and socio-material interactions trigger hybrid and active forms of passengers. This challenges notions of ‘seamless travel’ and flexible design based only on an operational perspective. The use of this analytical model sheds light on important aspects of developing airport design as agile (a learning tool) and airports as learning incubators.