APEX FTE Asia Expo 2025
Is Asia rewriting the aviation experience through design?
At The Brand Nursery, we’ve always believed that design has to have genuine purpose and should always be more than just decoration. During my recent visit to the 2025 Future Travel Experience show in Singapore I was buoyed to see that the APAC award winners during the show clearly support that belief as well.
Innovation in aviation rarely shouts and screams about its arrival, it tends to appear cautiously and quietly. For example, things like biometric e-gates that recognise you before you’ve reached them, autonomous/unmanned tugs that glide silently across the tarmac and electronic baggage tags that carry unfathomable amounts of personal data about the owner. No theatrics, just quiet purposeful progress.
At the 2025 Asia-Pacific Pioneer Awards a subtle revolution was taking place. From Tokyo to Singapore to Shenzhen, the region’s airlines and airports are making a statement that design-led thinking is no longer just a nice to have or a differentiator, it’s becoming the operating system of modern aviation.
The Craft of Design
What stood out for me was not technology for technology’s sake, but the way businesses are treating technology as a material as opposed to an operating system. It’s something to be shaped and humanised through craft and design.
For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) uses really high levels of automation and virtual training which goes beyond just trying to seek out operational efficiencies and reduce cost. ANA’s immersive virtual reality staff training suite not only builds confidence it also embeds behavioural consistency through real life, human-centred learning. Another example is ‘The Room’, its business-class suite, which blends comfort and sustainability through using fewer moving parts, lighter materials/seat structures, and delivers an impressive architectural sense of space for the lucky passenger at 35,000 feet.
This isn’t just design as styling. It’s design as a basis for intelligent solutions.
The System of Design
Cathay Pacific, another award winner has taken the philosophy of design as a system or a department to an impressive scale. Its brand new digital campus in Shenzhen and Co-Acceleration Programme suggest a future for the airline where the brand behaves less like a traditional carrier and more like a creative, design-led studio that builds products, services and experiences with the mindset of a startup.
Singapore Airlines also continued to demonstrate how tech engineering and emotional design can co-exist. Its AI platform ‘Jarvis’ is an intelligent assistant that helps ground staff and managers by providing a knowledge repository, a translation service and even copywriting for temporary signage etc. Again, this doesn’t simply streamline the ground operation of the airline, it creates better more informed staff that can make passenger journey’s feel more intuitive and brand centred. We’ve all heard about the ‘Singapore Airlines’ experience and this feels very much like part of the way they achieve this remarkable customer service.
Airports as Design Labs
Not a phrase that you come across too often, but the airports recognised at the awards reflected the sentiment that they are great places to test design thinking.
At Incheon Airport in South Korea, they are blending automation with what I can only describe as a sense of elegance. Ultra-fast biometric recognition as you transition from section to section through the airport, AI enabled baggage robots that help passengers from check-in desk to the departure gates and augmented reality wayfinding signage where arrows appear in your smartphone camera to guide you through the airport. These may all sound like science fiction but they’re interventions that make the airport experience feel more fluid, less fatiguing and perhaps frictionless travel is fast becoming the new luxury?
Changi Airport in Singapore has it’s DIVA system (Digital, Innovation, Ventures & Analytics) which is an incubator for new ideas and creates a culture for the airport as a whole. Changi is already considered one of the world’s best airports, but I genuinely feel it’s prototyping the airport of the future – see The Jewel for reference. This is also partially driven by Singapore as a country to become a ‘Smart Nation’. A government backed initiative where people will… “live meaningful and fulfilled lives, enabled seamlessly by technology”.
A New Model for Aviation Innovation
What unites all these award winners is a genuine sense of intent. They are not simply digitising processes; they are potentially redesigning the entire travel experience. They recognise that meaningful innovation and good design happens when ideas, empathy, engineering and imagination come together.
Design led innovation is a real strategic advantage that when done properly has the ability to transform complexity into experiences that feel effortless, reassuring and distinctly human. Whether this is through the comfort of a seat, the tone of a chatbot or the choreography of transiting through a terminal, Asia’s aviation industry are showing what happens when technology follows design, and not the other way around.
As a final thought, everyone I spoke to was aligned to the thought the future of flight won’t be defined by who has the most data or the largest AI model, but by who designs the most thoughtful, intuitive and inspiring ways to use this technology.
Words by James Acton