Mars Minds & Bodies Interfaces
I am thrilled to announce a collaboration between Maaind, Mars Society London, one of my favourite human beings on planet Earth- a multi-talented inventor and entrepreneur Cesar Jung-Harada, and the Bachelor of Arts and Science “Design+” at the Hong Kong University
Design Brief: To help enable humans to adapt to Mars, you are asked to design the technologies and interfaces between the newly adapted human minds and their hostile environment. These will include human emotional, psychological, physiological and social evolution, technologies that will monitor, understand and be able to augment human cognition, emotions and wellbeing, in order to maintain the safety, wellbeing and efficacy of these first missions.
Over the course of 3 months, the students are working on developing ideas and creating prototypes of their visions for the Mind interfaces in the context of Martian habitats. They are drawing inspiration from Maaind’s research and neurotechnology, which fuses voice, biometrics, including BCI, and other sensor technologies, allowing for real-time tracking and insights into the individual’s state of mind and highly personalised AI assistance via closed-loop biofeedback.
Timeline 2025–2100
The brief runs on a timeline from 2020 to the year 2100 that reflects on the expected growth of Martian colonies from 2–5 people in the year 2025 to 10,000,000 in the year 2100, as well as the development of technology, specifically neurotechnology and BCI. The students chose a “timezone” to imagine what the interfacing with technology would look like: from wearable devices and external BCIs to more invasive biological programming and eventual biological merger scenarios with the technologies involved.
Course support:
The students are getting support along the way from both Maaind’s and Mars Society London’s networks, allowing them to draw on world-class research in the field of neurotechnology and space exploration while experimenting with various currently available AI tools.
As part of this brief, the students had to create a narrative and a story. We couldn’t think of anyone better to inspire and start the process for them than Frank White — a sci-fi author who coined the term the Overview Effect. The Overview Effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space [Wikipedia].
While we want the students to imagine plausible use-cases for mind interfaces in future Martian habitats, we want to make sure this project opens an opportunity for them to be able to reflect on the design practices here on Earth and the responsibility that all designers have in building more sustainable and positive worlds. Thinking about the future within the hard constraints of Mars allows for a very unique window of creativity and innovation to think back on how we do things here on Earth.
I am very excited to see what they come up with!
The results of the project will be exhibited on the 15th of June in Hong Kong and presented at the Mars Society 2020 global conference. Details to follow.
You can follow the progress of the project on my twitter or:
Mars Society London: Twitter, Facebook, Website
Maaind: Twitter, Facebook, Website
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ABOUTS
The BASc(Design+) at Hong Kong University is aimed at nurturing highly effective, adaptive and creative graduates who can lead across multiple disciplinary subjects, and who will become known globally for their distinctive qualities of creativity, analytical ability, critical thinking and innovative problem-solving.
Mars Society London: a community of Mars and Space Pioneers and Entrepreneurs in London and the UK. We want to inspire and enable a new generation of scientists, technologists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors and others to direct their talents and skills towards this exciting and important cause of our generation.
Maaind is a neurotechnology and AI start-up developing the world’s first AI assistant for the mind, Aurora.
