Everyone chortled and guffawed at the story in yesterday’s New York Times article (see “One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand“) about a proposal by Airbus to introduce a “standing-room only” section to their planes, in which passengers would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness. The Times (and perhaps Airbus too) appeared to be mollifying its American readers by emphasizing that Airbus has, thus far, only pitched its idea to Asian carriers, and only for short-hop flights, e.g., from one Japanese city to another. But even this was apparently too controversial: by mid-morning yesterday, CNN Money was reporting that Airbus denied holding such talks with Asian carriers (see “Airbus Denies Standing-Room ‘Seats’.”)

But I don’t think Airbus should be embarrassed at all, and I also think we should all stop laughing about such innovative ideas. Don’t get me wrong: it’s highly unlikely that I would ever take such a flight — but that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of other passengers (and potential passengers) who would. And even if the stand-up seating idea turns out to be completely unsuccessful, it still represents an important example of challenging one’s assumptions, and trying to identify the real requirements associated with a system. That’s what IT professionals (who may call themselves “systems analysts,” “requirements analysts,” “business analysts,” “software engineers,” or just plain old “programmers”) are supposed to do when they collaborate with an end-user to create a system to solve some problem, or to exploit some opportunity.

Actually, I’m not even sure that I would reject the stand-up seating approach in all cases. If the price was sufficiently attractive, and if the flight was only an hour long (i.e., the duration of a NYC-Boston or NYC-Washington flight on the Delta shuttle), I might well consider it. Think of it this way: you’re making a personal trip to visit dear old Grandma in Boston, with yourself, your spouse, and three kids. The normal round-trip shuttle fare is (according to the Delta website, as of this morning) is $618.60; multiply that by five people, and you’ve spent $3,093. If Delta offered a round-trip stand-up ticket for, say, $100, you’d save $2,500. No matter how fond my memories of first-class travel might be — including trans-Atlantic flights where dinner was served upstairs in a Boeing 747, with fine china, linen napkins, and real knives and forks — I would certainly choose the stand-up option, and pocket the $2,500 savings.

And even if I wasn’t interested in the stand-up option, lots of other people might be — budget-conscious vacation-bound families being one obvious example, and cash-strapped college students being another. Indeed, even if nobody is interested in the stand-up option today, next year’s collection of vacationers and college students might be. That’s something we always have to keep in mind when designing a system with a long lifetime: subsequent waves, or generations, of customers (and potential customers) might have different requirements, expectations, and desires about the products and services they use.

Perhaps more important: tomorrow’s generation will have different experiences, mental/physical constraints, and built-in assumptions about those products and services. For example, I represent one of about five successive generations who always assumed that airplane passengers had to travel from point A to point B in a seat. Where did that assumption come from? Perhaps from the automobiles that preceded airplanes, and perhaps from the horse-and-buggy vehicles that preceded automobiles. Or perhaps it was a technology-based constraint: perhaps the early aircraft designers simply couldn’t build planes whose fuselages were tall enough for passengers to stand. Whatever the reason, the result is a generation-spanning assumption that “that’s the way it’s always been.”

Thus, as the New York Times article pointed out, most of the R&D work in today’s cost-conscious airlines involves “incremental” improvements to the traditional passenger seat — e.g., using new materials to build seats that are lighter (to save fuel) and thinner (to allow a few more seats to be squeezed into the available space). But it seems that very few people are asking the more fundamental question of, “Why is it a ‘requirement’ that we have seats in the first place?” If we start challenging such assumptions, we might find additional options. Rather than standing people up, for example, why not lie them down — and stack them up, one on top of another? If you think that’s crazy, remember the precedent of sleeping compartments in the old-fashioned long-haul trains.

For that matter, why do passengers even have to be conscious on today’s flights? Most of us don’t have a view out the window anyway; we don’t get any meals; the peanuts and free drinks have disappeared; they’ve taken away our blankets and pillows; and we’ve already seen the heavily-censored movies that often don’t get shown anyway, because the airlines are too cheap to fix their broken projectors. So why not just put us all to sleep for an hour or two, stack us up like sardines, and get rid of a few more flight attendants? Why not have flights where we eliminate all passenger baggage (to eliminate a problem that’s gotten entirely out of hand), and convert the plane’s cargo/baggage compartment to passenger space? The possibilities are endless; the mind boggles.

Or maybe the airline CEO’s should get some consulting advice from Jonathan Schwartz, the newly-appointed chief executive at Sun Microsystems. An article in today’s New York Times (see “For Sun Microsystems, a Leader With Little Taste for Convention“), provided an interesting example of Schwartz’s thinking: “General Motors, he suggests, should think about giving away its cars to customers willing to subscribe to an aggressively priced version of OnStar, the company’s cellular telephone-based support service — the way cable companies give away set-top boxes.” Hmmm … is there some higher-priced product or service that the airlines could sell us, in return for a free seat on the next flight from New York to Boston? Alas, the only answers that come to my innovation-weary mind involve sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll — which means it’s probably illegal. But some good brainstorming sessions with a “focus group” of college students, vacation-bound families, and other travelers might come up with an interesting list of ideas.

The point to remember, which we systems-builders have to remember anew every day, is that one customer’s “requirement” is another customer’s “option.” One generation’s set of built-in assumptions are negotiable, if not downright irrelevant, to the next generation, especially in a fast-changing world like ours. No matter how sexy and sophisticated our computer technology might be, the real winners in tomorrow’s competitive battle for the hearts and minds of customers, will be the entrepreneurs and the companies that figure out what the real requirements are. Two excellent books to help you focus on the requirements issue are Mastering the Requirements Process (2nd edition), by James and Suzanne Robertson; and Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design, by Gerald Weinberg and Donald Gause.

So, let me know when Airbus decides to try out that stand-up seating idea. I might just give it a try…