JetBlue counter, Sea-Tac airport

This sign directs JetBlue customers to a counter based on their specific situation. The first item listed is Kiosk “Oops” Messages. JetBlue is bold enough to acknowledge that things aren’t always going to work perfectly and they’ve made the path to error recovery prominent. This is good customer service, and it’s good design: allow for – and acknowledge that you are allowing for – failures, and reframe them positively.

I flew JetBlue yesterday out of JFK and had a chance to wander next door to the shuttered TWA terminal, one of my favorite buildings. I flew out of there many years ago, just once, and it was pretty neat. See the whole set of pictures.

The latest FreshMeat is up, looking at the issue of cell phones on airplanes.

The cell phone continues to be a surprisingly prominent item in our public discourse. The idea of the phone exists on multiple simultaneous fronts:
- a technology platform for multimedia (i.e., camera phones and text messaging)
- an economic booster (ringtones, just the latest flavor in mobile merchandising are big bucks, perhaps even a legit solution to the problem of music sharing)
- a designed accessory that displays economic and social status (or at least aspirations thereof) – check out Bling Kit for cell phones, including Swarovski crystals, the rhinestones of the new millennium
- a performance item to either facilitate or impede social interaction (just when we were beginning to get used to the handsfree users who appear to walk around talking to no one, the New York Times reports on a supposedly emerging behavior where people use their phones to avoid face-to-face interactions, making like they are talking to someone – but are really talking to no one)
- a challenge to unstated but powerful social norms (in one of many examples, a man got out of his car and punched another driver who was talking on his phone instead of moving when the light turned green