Beyond skin deep. Emotional design is the airline industry’s secret weapon

We all swoon over new cabin renderings, lounge photos, or glossy seat fabrics. But ask yourself: how many of those details stay in your memory a week later? What passengers really recall is how they felt. The calm of stepping into a lounge that cocooned them from the chaos of the terminal. The spark of anticipation triggered by a cabin detail that delivered cultural stories or sparked childhood mystery. In aviation, with its stress, waiting, and uncertainty, emotional design is not a luxury. It is the difference between forgettable journeys and lasting advocates.

Don Norman, one of the foremost voices in design thinking, has long argued that “everything has a personality, everything sends an emotional signal.” He describes emotional design in three layers: visceral, behavioural, and reflective. The visceral is the gut reaction when you first enter a space. The behavioural is how the product feels to use and inhabit. The reflective is the narrative you carry home and retell. In aviation, these layers often work in fragments, but the airlines that leave a real impression are those that weave them together, conciously. A cabin may look striking, but if it is hard to use, passengers remember the dissonance. Conversely, an understated space that makes you feel calmer, more capable, or more cared for will resonate long after the journey ends.

Take China Airlines. Their claw lamp in the business class cabin is more than decoration. It evokes childlike intrigue, a sense of myth, almost a Game of Thrones meets Chinese folklore moment. Coupled with persimmon wood tones and whimsical details, the cabin takes on the atmosphere of a Mad Hatter’s tea party in a Studio Ghibli-esque forest. That playfulness transforms the visceral first impression into something you remember, because it disrupts the seriousness of most airline interiors. The feeling it sparks is curiosity, wonder, and delight.

Contrast this with Lufthansa and Swiss. On paper, their business class seats and cabin geometries are identical. Yet the feelings they create are worlds apart. Lufthansa’s palette of colder colours and harder surfaces produces a utilitarian, almost clinical impression. It is efficient but distant. Swiss, with the same hardware, chooses natural woods, softer textiles, and warmer tones. The effect is completely different: warmth, welcome, and calm. The seat may be the same, but the memory is not. This is emotional design in action, transforming sameness into differentiation.

You can see the same principle outside aviation. Apple’s minimalist interiors, whether in their stores or product packaging, slow us down. The space around each object makes it feel more premium, borrowing cues from luxury fashion boutiques and art galleries. The restraint frames the product as precious.

By contrast, CitizenM or Moxy hotels inject energy into their communal spaces with bold art, colour, modular furniture and tongue-in-cheek graphics. Their lobbies feel more like living rooms designed for creative encounters, and the result is a kind of social energy that delivers a feel good buzz and makes you want to linger. One approach refines, the other vivifies, but both demonstrate how emotional design is always intentional, and always about how you feel when you inhabit a space.

Lounges are where this lesson often plays out in aviation, because they have more latitude to deliver complete design stories. No1 Lounges, for instance, have shifted toward residential design, echoing Cathay Pacific’s approach. The palette of soft tactile fabrics, natural planting, and retro-inspired colours taps into the kind of rooms we once knew in our parents’ homes. These familiar cues soothe and disarm, counteracting the stress of the airport outside. What might have been just another holding area becomes a space that feels personal, almost nostalgic, and therefore emotionally restorative.

Finnair has applied the same thinking digitally. Settle into your seat, and the inflight entertainment greets you with moody Nordic landscapes—misty forests, frozen lakes, cloudy skies. In the nesting process, when passengers adjust pillows and unpack belongings, the screen is already nudging them into calm. It is a subtle move, but it reflects the brand’s ethos of serenity and nature. Here the behavioural layer is enhanced by visual storytelling, supporting the visceral and shaping the reflective memory too.

Some airlines go for drama. Emirates’ approach, famous and sometimes infamous, layers gold trims, glossy woods, and ornate details across its cabins. For some, it borders on excess, but its effect is undeniable: it creates a sense of occasion. It affirms status in a way that echoes luxury car interiors, long symbols of wealth and aspiration. Whether loved or critiqued, it leaves passengers with a powerful reflective story – they flew something special, something they could describe vividly and a sense of achievement.

Even the aircraft exterior can be an emotional tool. Air Tahiti Nui and Fiji Airways adorn their fuselages with regional patterns. Boarding such a plane, passengers feel an anticipatory lift, a sense that the journey has already begun. The branding reaches beyond logos and liveries, tapping directly into psychological excitement and pride. Virgin’s has long marketed its livery as a billboard for a feeling of sass and sophistication, those that travel Virgin feel special, because the design cues try to elevate above the ordinary.

Lighting ties all these examples together. It is one of the most potent emotional levers in cabin design. Cold dark blues lower the temperature both literally and emotionally. Warm ambers relax and reassure. Pinks and purples excite and uplift. The wrong shade of green, however, can wash out skin tones and leave people feeling unwell. Light is never neutral. It shapes the way passengers feel in real time, often more than seat pitch or recline angle and it’s why airlines still often see this as an unchartered frontier when it comes to cabin design.

Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect, once wrote about the atmosphere of buildings, how light, material, and sound combine to create silence and presence. Aviation spaces are no different. A boarding gate can feel like a cattle pen or like an orchestrated moment of calm depending on the way light, surfaces, and cues are composed. This is the craft of emotional design – turning necessary transitions into moments that carry meaning.

All of this matters because travel is defined less by technical detail and more by memory. A cabin that looks modern but feels cold will be remembered as cold. A lounge that uses familiar textures to create warmth will be remembered as welcoming. Airlines thrive on repeat customers, and repeat customers are won through stories that people tell afterward. Emotional design is what makes those stories positive.

It also creates forgiveness. Disruption is inevitable. Flights delay, meals run out, turbulence interrupts sleep. When passengers have already been cared for emotionally, they are more forgiving. The goodwill from a soothing lounge, a surprising cabin detail, or an uplifting boarding moment creates resilience. Emotional design is not only about delight, it is also about recovery.

The task for designers, then, is to ask new questions. Not “what does this look like on a press release?” but “what emotion will this spark, and what memory will it leave behind?” Norman reminds us that design is an act of communication, and in aviation the people we communicate with are at their most vulnerable: tired, stressed, excited, or apprehensive. To design for them is to design for emotion. As a designer, ask yourself, “what story am I trying to tell here?”

Looks are only skin deep. What endures is the way we feel. From CitizenM’s playful communal energy to Apple’s minimalist calm, from Swiss’ warmth to Emirates’ spectacle, every choice in design communicates. Aviation must embrace that truth if it wants to create journeys that are not just seen but remembered.

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