Helping NASA Get It Done
Imagine, for a minute, that you’ve been tasked with building the most powerful rocket of all time. This rocket is supposed to enable human exploration far beyond Earth’s orbit and robotic scientific missions to places like Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. How on Earth do you know when you’ve accomplished everything necessary to literally shoot tons and tons of mass hurtling into space without error or danger to the astronauts you’re lifting out of orbit?
In a nutshell, this is Team Far Out’s challenge for the next seven months through Carnegie Mellon’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction Capstone project:
Help NASA engineers better sort through complex data to answer the question “are we done with this stage of rocket building?” for the Space Launch System (SLS).
For the uninitiated, Capstone is an opportunity for MHCI students to partner with an industry client and cover the end-to-end design process through a product development lifecycle. After our teams are formed, we get one-pagers with a prompt detailing the problem space. These prompts are left intentionally ambiguous so we can totally own our projects, making research and design decisions and strategizing as a team.
Luckily, my team does pretty well with ambiguity. Assigned to our client in the middle of the government shutdown, we were prohibited from reaching out to our primary NASA contacts for the first two weeks of the assignment and left to forge our own path as we began to make sense of the SLS, functional analysis, graph databases and systems engineering principles. The shutdown is over (for now) and we’ve jumped on the opportunity to officially kick the project off with our NASA contacts, picking their brain and making plans for a research trip to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in the next few weeks.
So, who is Team Far Out?
Gabrielle (Gaby) Gayles studied Human Biology and Creative Writing at Stanford, where she nurtured a fascination with the intersection of design, behavioral science and storytelling. She’s a skilled researcher, designer and writer.
Intergalactic Space Fact: Her favorite space movie is Interstellar.
Team Role: Design Lead, Research Support
Aniruddh (Rudy) Iyer studied Computer Science and Engineering at PES University in Bangalore, but discovered a much deeper passion in User Experience Design and Research. Rudy is a talented developer, researcher and project manager.
Intergalactic Space Fact: His favorite constellation is Orion.
Team Role: Technical Lead, Research Support
Katherine Jiang graduated from UVa with a degree in Commerce before moving to New York City to work in advertising. She loves creating thoughtful experiences based on well-researched insights into human behavior. Katherine is an experienced designer and researcher.
Intergalactic Space Fact: If the Olympics relocated to the moon, she thinks the swimming events would be the most fun to watch.
Team Role: Design Lead, Research Support
Judith (Judy) Leng went to Duke to study Visual Media, Art History and German, followed by a stint in architecture school before she realized her real passions lie in the field of HCI. She is an expert designer and enjoys exploring the ways user-centered design connects across a multitude of disciplines to positively impact large groups of people.
Intergalactic Space Fact: If she could travel to any planet and return unharmed, she’d go to Saturn, for the view.
Team Role: Design Lead, Research Support
Allana Wooley studied Anthropology and Writing at TCU. After graduating, she spent a year in South Korea on a Fulbright grant and developed a love for well-designed technology experiences and returned to the US to work as a software project manager. Allana has experience as a project manager, researcher and writer.
Intergalactic Space Fact: Allana would absolutely accept a seat on any future mission to Mars.
Team Role: Project Manager, Research Support
We’ll take turns writing updates as our project research, designs and prototypes progress over the next several months, so you’ll get to hear all of our perspectives. Stay tuned!
