Easyjet puzzle

Easyjet, the budget airline company, has used the puzzle to communicate a vision of infinite adaptability for its new holiday planning service. Travel agents quake in their boots at the prospect of the introduction of another ‘cutting out the middle-man’ policy that seems to characterise a world where the consumer is in complete command over the product’s creation.

The gaps in the puzzle are not just opportunities to introduce easyjet’s logo and the eye-catching price, but suggest an incomplete product that we as consumers have to fill in with our own individual wants and desires. Rather than relying on travel agents to craft us the perfect holiday the onlooker is invited to finish the product off, a task, that according to the 1960s psychologist of consumer desire Ernest Dichter, improves the marketability of the product: ‘a sculpture, painting, or poster is better if somewhat incomplete, if the onlooker is invited to fill it in’ (1).

But easyjet have forgotten an inherent feature of puzzles. As French novelist of everyday life Georges Perec explained in Life: a user’s manual:

‘… despite appearances puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before… every blunder and every insight, each hope and each encouragement have all been designed, calculated and decided by the other.’ (2)

All those spaces to fill in in one’s own construction of the perfect Roman holiday, have been designed by the puzzle-maker who has determined the shape of each piece, each little interlocking nodule, and the image. Easyjet give the illusion of a customisable holiday through the use of the puzzle, but the gaps represent permitted choice within the wider, inflexible expectations of holiday experience that easyjet have created. Part of this is the expectation that the best experience of Rome is the one evoked in the image, the perfect sunset, perhaps with a friendly Italian waiter serving a linguine and a glass of Pinot Grigio to the side? The idyllic postcard image, so often thought to be a sign of a holiday’s success. Surely we would want to fill the gaps in the top left with a continuation of the light pink sky.

No. If this was a genuine puzzle the remaining gaps would surely be filled in with images of baggage hall reclaim waiting, miscommunication, a tepid meal, an overly priced bottle of wine, a sense of not knowing how to behave. It would cause an interruption to the image, of course, but then easyjet is leaving the canvas blank for us to fill in.

I’m going on a research trip to America for the next couple of weeks, and although it is not a holiday (as I keep trying to explain to my non-student friends!) I will be going to a place I have never been before. Taking easyjet’s lead I will describe my experience there as a puzzle in future blogs. It is doubtful that it would be as coherent and idyllic as the image above. I am sure that a lot of the pieces will be indistinctive, hard to place and sometimes will not fit together very well. Maybe some of the pieces are missing or have suffered neglect with others looking like they have freshly come out of the factory. We’ll see.