The Future Airport – Experiments and Innovative Technologies

Zooming in on the micro-processes involved in developing and user testing new technologies for airports, this article works with the notion of experiments as a way to understand iterative practices and future (re)orientations. In doing so, I aim to think through experiences and experiments with applied anthropology and corporate ethnography within a dialogic framework of 1) current airport industry efforts of re-visioning stakeholder collaboration and airport re-branding and 2) the attempts of a Danish start-up company to create market disruption through innovative technology development. Although the experiments take place at different scales and are performed in different ways, I contend that they must be considered within a common frame in order to tease out their interconnectedness, particularly with regards to experimental confines and motivations. Based on some relatively raw case material, this article unfolds the different layers of experiments and the underlying assumptions that they make apparent.