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Customer-Centric Organsational Design icon
Customer-Centric Organsational Design
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Dublin Airport

Defining the passenger experience vision to secure investment

Truly excellent work by Mima as part of the AECOM team bringing that critical and all-important passenger experience to the centre of equally great architecture and engineering. 

Stephen Byrne - Head of Design and Delivery Dublin Airport Authority

Services: Experience Masterplanning

We were part of a multi-consultant team that helped Dublin Airport Authority develop their passenger experience vision for their Future Investment Programme

Our Task

We were part of a multi-consultant team tasked with helping Dublin Airport Authority develop their passenger experience vision for their Future Investment Programme.

Phil, Head of Experience Design at Mima, is white and wears a blue shirt. He is working at a table that is full of working papers. Walls of colourful post-it notes are behind him.
David, Mima's Managing Director, is white with blonde hair. He stands with a colleague in front of three workshopping walls - full of paper and colourful post-it notes. They are in discussion, with the colleague pointing to a particular detail on one of the pages.
A written Mima table, in green and black writing, detailing the journey of a persona, 'Fiona'. The table has rows to input Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Questions.

Our Solution

Working alongside the DAA Insights Team and the Asset Management Division, we examined how future trends and a more diverse range of users may impact customer needs and expectations. These drove a vision for the passenger experience based on three core themes: human touch, seamless journeys and personalisation.

Using storytelling, a series of ‘experience sketches’ were developed to give a unifying idea for each area of the infrastructure, with a description of how Dublin Airport thinks about instilling a sense of place through design. The output was produced to help the future contractor understand the desired experience and how to realise it as the design develops.


By building on their customer data to define the future passenger experience, we were able to use design thinking methodologies to blend infrastructure design and experience.

A wide-ranging set of infrastructure proposals, developed by AECOM and Pascall + Watson, were submitted as part a 5-year Future Investment Plan.

Uniquely, the project addressed the challenge of blending infrastructure planning with experience design early on.

A passenger-led approach

A series of passenger personas captured the key behaviours from airport data and passenger profiles. Role playing these personas through the proposed new infrastructure identified strengths and weaknesses in the design and highlighted potential threats to the experience.

We developed a set of experience principles and used them to identify innovative new concepts for new services, airport processes and touchpoints.

Developing the Experience Vision

This work has continued on the conceptual design for the South Apron Hub. We have developed a new approach for how experience can be embedded within architectural and Design & Build processes.

It has given Dublin Airport a foundation for producing an airport-wide strategy for customer experience that can be used across all future projects.

As a continuation of the work on the programme, Mima was asked to support this project to ensure that the experience concepts were embedded in the designs.

Storytelling to blend infrastructure and experience

Working alongside the DAA Insights Team and the Asset Management Division, we examined how future trends and a more diverse range of users may impact customer needs and expectations. These drove a vision for the passenger experience based on three core themes: human touch, seamless journeys and personalisation.

Using storytelling, a series of ‘experience sketches’ were developed to give a unifying idea for each area of the infrastructure, with a description of how Dublin Airport thinks about instilling a sense of place through design. The output was produced to help the future contractor understand the desired experience and how to realise it as the design develops.

Throughout this project, we worked in collaboration with world-renowned airport designer & consultant, Brian Edes. Brian brought operational and design expertise to our work.

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