On the last long-haul flight I took, it occurred to me that the design of airplane seats really hasn't kept pace with the times. Looking around the cabin, you can spot plenty of folks with those horseshoe-shaped neck pillows, meant to compensate for the seat's lame headrests; there's no place for me to leave my noise-canceling headphones, another common modern-day amenity, when I go to the bathroom; during the drinks service, the entire tray must be deployed to hold that one little cup; and there's no good place for me to prop my tablet up.

Paperclip Design has been paying attention, and they've attempted to address all these things and more with their comprehensive Meerkat seat design concept. At first blush it doesn't appear radically different than a regular airplane seat, but you'll see that a fair amount of thought went into this:

As with their last two concepts we looked at, I'm not 100% on all of the features—I like the tablet rest, for instance, but am not sure how stable that angle is—but these are minor, niggling details. The point is that the designers at Paperclip are actually looking at the way people fly and trying to come up with contemporary solutions.

Given a choice to fly in a Meerkat seat or what's currently available, I'd choose the former in a heartbeat. The question is, will we get that choice? Paperclip designed this back in 2012, and sadly, there doesn't appear to be any sign of industry uptake.