Beside being an aviation nut, I’m a fan of Apple computers and other products… Hello iPhone, iPods… One of the books I’m reading right now is Inside Steve’s brain by Leander Kahney. A whole chapter of this book is dedicates to Jobs’s pursuit of excellence in design. Attention paid to every detail, from materials to shapes to packaging and the look of almost every single pixel.

A part of Apple’s success comes from the simplicity and ease of use of their products, anyone can understand them. Simple things look easy and friendly, but anyone who already tried to do some design – whatever the domain – knows that it’s not easy. There’s a very good quote on that in the book, and it’s not even from Jobs, but from Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian sculptor who once said:

Simplicity is complexity resolved

I find it brilliant, simply. I had these things in mind when I saw a Garmin advert on the backside of a previous edition of the AOPA magazine. A nice cockpit (Beechcraft if I’m correct) with a G600, a GNS530, a GNS430 and a Garmin transponder. The picture was detailed enough, so one could see the stopwatch displayed on the transponder’s LCD screen…

The engineer in me thought “Cool idea, there’s anyway so much electronics in a transponder that fitting a chronograph in that. Then I linked that with the design considerations from the book. Why shall a transponder contain a stopwatch ? By the way, the GNS430 and 530 also have equivalent features. And the G600 as well. I used to fly with ADF receivers that could also be used as stopwatch. Many aircraft also have a dashboard mounted watch with chronograph function.

From a user experience point of view a cockpit is not exactly simple or easy to understand. Electronics, and particularly integrated glass-cockpits, allowed for some standardization, but the overall complexity is still overwhelming. If you’re familiar with the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit, or with any other Garmin unit, you probably eared the term “buttonology” a couple of times, don’t you ? The sole existence of this term proves that despite all their efforts, the design guys at Garmin have not solved the complexity.

I still think that glass cockpits with touch screens will help improving the usability of our cockpits and make them much easier to understand. The Garmin G3000 is certainly a good step in this direction, but the PFD and MFD must also go touch, not just some extra input devices.

Is Steve Jobs gets bored working for Apple and Pixar, I’m sure he could find new challenges and express all his love for good design in the glass-cockpit area…