Fire Hose and Puzzle Pieces
Moving towards a better understanding from analogous domain interviews and research trip at Marshall.
Team Far Out went on a very fruitful treasure hunt for the last two weeks! If you’re wondering who we are — this intro might be helpful.
Understanding where we are
If you would remember, we are working with NASA to help engineers understand if/when they are “done” with a step in preparing SLS for launch. None of us were remotely familiar with how rockets work and how data flows through that system, so we started with breaking down our prompt into several key concepts. At the end of our preparation phase, we shared our (updated) understandings.
And then, CMU had a snow day after many years…
… which we used to flesh out our Spring research plan with questions we are hoping to answer. Along with the plan, we also considered appropriate research activities to help us get the answers, key points we want to prioritize, strategies to maximize what we can get from onsite research and metrics for defining success. We also learned that NASA is using a tool called FIQS to visualize the relationship between functions and requirements defined in the SLS program. Following a client call, we were introduced to Ian Maddox, our subject matter expert at Marshall Space Flight Center, and we spent a few solid hours with him virtually going through a training deck on the basics of the tool.
”Borrowing” from analogous domains
Concurrent with trying to learn about FIQS itself, we also started reaching out to people working in industries that involve different teams making a collective effort over time to tackle complex systems with interconnected requirements, specifically in the context of defining “done”. Through the 8 interviews we conducted with people in domains that share some of the characteristics (manufacturing, construction, software engineering, to name a few), we got a little closer to understanding how collaboration and communication happen, what tools were used to support the processes and how changes and progress are tracked.
Each domain offered unique insights and sometimes operates on a case-by-case basis, so we built respective journey maps to visualize how an individual or a team navigates throughout the timeline of a project.
With what we learned from these domains, we continued to refine our research questions in preparation of our research trip at Marshall.
Diving deep into our problem s-p-a-c-e
The time has come!
We took some time to map out our current understanding of our project as related to the overall structure of SLS — how different concepts are related — with all the acronyms we now know by heart, and in the afternoon we jumped onto the plane to Huntsville, Alabama.
In the coming two days, we interviewed 8 people with a variety of roles at NASA (that Ian was kind enough to schedule for us), ranging from the lead system engineer — who has a higher-level understanding of the project/organization and evaluates systems with an integrated lens— to propulsion engineer, who is specialized in more on-the-ground knowledge about particular segments of the entire program. We also went on guided tours at some of the facilities and gained deeper contextual understanding of how the different parts and pieces fit together.
Getting comfortable with their language
The first interview dumped a bowl of alphabet soup on us, just as we thought we’ve had a basic grasp of the terminology. We adapted quickly — despite the dozens of acronyms that came up one after another. We were able to follow up with prompt clarifications and further research, and we found that making references to the vocabulary our interviewees were familiar with (such as a tool they use to draft changes for approval) helped facilitate the conversations.
Connecting the dots
We took turns to do interviews in pairs and conduct interpretation sessions — re-telling the story to uncover insights while our memories were still fresh. It was very exciting to see the pieces starting to come together, be it an echo of a previous note or a voice from different perspective. As we wrapped up, we also consulted with Ian on a couple of lingering questions we had regarding the overall workflow of SLS.
“So after all that is done, you get a smiley face.”
Digesting all the info, but also having a blast!
The trip not only helped us get rich information about the domain and the challenge we are working to address, but also gave us the opportunity to get to know more about each other — for example, some of us are good at throwing axes and some of us have pretty strong arms! Additionally, being on-site and observing engineers in their day-to-day environment added another layer to our learnings as we start to think about the role that technology plays in the SLS ecosystem that is also intertwined with human relationships.
We’re thankful for our clients who flew over from California to join us at Marshall and provided clarifications and feedback!
We have sorted out all our interview notes from analogous domain and at NASA. Starting from next week, we will be synthesizing the raw data we’ve collected as we have a couple of more remote interviews in parallel.
More funsies are on the way. Stay tuned!
We are 5 MHCI students at Carnegie Mellon University, currently working on our capstone project, where we work with NASA to help engineers understand being “done” in building the Space Launch System (SLS). We will be taking turns to write about our research activities and insights, design decisions and how we navigate through ambiguity in general.
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