Exploring the problem ~space~
Sprints 1 & 2: Venus and Mercury
Hey, everyone! Megan here with an update on Team NASA. 🚀
First thing’s first: we’re still struggling to come up with a legitimate team name. Sadly, an analysis of our initials didn’t get us very far (JK MAN, anyone?), but the search continues. For now, Team NASA will have to do, but we welcome any and all suggestions (preferably space themed).
As I write, our team is in transit to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Over the next three days, we’ll be interviewing flight controllers, astronaut trainers, and even a former CapCom, the one individual in Mission Control who actually communicates directly with the astronauts while they’re in space. Armed with our 13-page protocol (which will most likely go out the window a few minutes into each interview), we can’t wait to dive headfirst into some primary research.
Sprint 1: Mercury
We ended Sprint 1 with a debrief of the close to 20 research papers sent to us by our NASA sponsors. Spanning a range of topics, the papers brought us up to speed on current NASA practices while introducing us to future visions of deep space missions.
After dividing and conquering the papers, we came together as a team to hold a debrief session. Each of us shared summaries and thoughts from our readings. This exercise unsurprisingly raised more questions than it answered, but it gave us a great jumping off point as we move toward primary research.
Importantly, conducting secondary research and debriefing as a team helped us come to a common understanding of stakeholder relationships, important terms, and potential avenues of exploration.
Sprint 2: Venus
Interviews
With secondary research under our belt, we began Sprint 2 by reaching out to any and all contacts for interviews.
Actual astronauts remain elusive despite the various LinkedIn messages we’ve sent, but over the past week, we were able to interview a NASA robotics engineer, a United Launch Alliance engineer, and Mario Berges and Burcu Akinci, two Carnegie Mellon professors in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department.
Through these interviews, we gained perspective on how engineers currently approach problem solving and anomaly diagnosis. As we work to make this knowledge accessible to astronauts, continuing to examine how human experts currently troubleshoot will prove invaluable.
Pretotyping
Research comprises the vast majority of our time at the moment, but we want to make sure we’re constantly making things. Enter the pretotype. According to Alberto Savoia, a pretotype simulates the “core experience” of a product “with the smallest possible investment of time and money.”
Our team wasted no time in brainstorming a multitude of ideas to simulate. From the truly terrible (what if we just sent mission control up in ten spaceships following the main spaceship — communication delay solved?) to the actually feasible, the ideas we generated will help inform our research moving forward.
We eventually decided on creating a pretotype of an AR application that combines telemetry and engineering data to show the current state of any given ship component to the user. Finding creative ways to combine static and dynamic data will be an area of focus as we move forward.
Inspired by our pretotype, we then proceeded to spend half a day exploring the International Space Station via VR. Would recommend.
What’s Next?
Our first step after Houston will be debriefing and consolidating insights, but as we look toward Sprint 3 (Earth!), we also want to dive deeper into examining analogous domains. We’re focusing on industries where human experts diagnose problems in complex, engineered machinery (bonus points if there’s a communication delay involved).
This week, Katie got a head start on our analogous domain research by conducting a contextual inquiry with an electrical engineer fixing his car. While this may not seem relevant to astronauts on their way to Mars at first glance, we can hopefully take advantage of natural problem solving techniques in our eventual solution.
This Week’s Media Recommendation
This week, I bring you the NASA Selfies app, a mobile application from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that lets you take spacesuit selfies with various educational backgrounds. Choose from a multitude of galaxies, nebulas, and stars to make your selfies ~out of this world~ (sorry, couldn’t resist).
