Ain’t No Mission Far Enough, Ain’t No Crater Low Enough
Sprint 3: Synthesis and Reframing
Can you believe we’re officially at the halfway point of the semester? With 7 weeks under our belt and plenty more to go, we’ve started to hone in on specific areas of our project ~space~ that we’d like to tackle.
Since our last post, we’ve wrapped up our first round of interviews (a total of 13 one hour-long sessions with NASA SMEs so far), returned to our habitat (our Miro board) to create affinity diagrams from our interview notes, synthesized key takeaways, rapid prototyped future states, reevaluated our simulated mission protocol, and planned our next steps. Phew! That was a lot wasn’t it? Need a breather? (We definitely do!) Sorry, it’s too late to turn back now! Put your space suit on and buckle up — we’re hurtling through Sprint 3!
To Affinity and Beyond 🚀
The big word on our comms channels this sprint has been *affinitizing* i.e. creating affinity diagrams. Affinity diagramming is a method of thematic analysis where different pieces of data are grouped into categories of related ideas in order to unearth patterns and get a deeper understanding of the natural relationships between different data points. This is often done with post-it notes, or in our case, virtual post-it notes, with each one containing a single observation, finding, or insight from our interviews. It’s safe to say that we may have saved a few trees by doing this online, as we’d accumulated a whopping 307 post-it notes across all our sessions! (And this was just for one board!)
We began our affinitization (is this even a word?) last week by organizing all the post-it notes into groups such as Mission Log Features, Perception of Time, Context of Communication, Crew Mental Health, etc., and defined the relationships between these different categories. We then synthesized each category into a single all-encompassing takeaway. At this point, we had 46 stickies which we opted to further affinitize to generate more overarching ideas. By the end of this process, we were able to whittle down our 46 post-its into 9 high thematic takeaways.
- Crew safety is always the TOP priority for any manned mission. Therefore, any tools utilized, decision-making that is taking place, and communication methods need to prioritize and center around astronauts’ mental and physical well-being.
- As missions travel further into deep space, the amount of resources available to crew can increasingly become a bottleneck for day-to-day activities. As crew will also experience an increase in autonomy over the protocols of these daily tasks, they have to be nimble with these limited resources and make decisions to optimize productivity.
- Although communications will continue to become more asynchronous with deep space missions, crew will still need guidance from MCC to navigate these foreign environments. Comms will therefore need to provide ample situational awareness about crew’s tasks and surroundings to adequately prepare them for a majority of potential scenarios even under time delay.
- Deep space missions can take from 7 months to upwards of a year. During that entire period, astronauts will be in an extremely rigorous work environment while also being socially isolated (apart from communications with each other and asynchronous communications with those on Earth). Consequently, crew’s communication as well as their emotional and psychological needs have to be supported while decreasing cognitive load. This is because their mental well-being is directly related to their safety and mission success.
- Asynchronous communication leads to large periods of idle time where crew are left to their own devices. In these instances, crew often tries to tackle any issue that arises by themselves and efforts from MCC to strictly control the procedure is, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, overwhelming and a hindrance to crew’s work. However, there are also situations when crew needs to rely on MCC to deliver detailed information and protocols to aid in their tasks. There needs to be a balance between MCC providing direction (dependency of crew on MCC to guide tasks) and providing support (crew has the autonomy to work through a task.)
- Voice communication becomes more obsolete as missions move further away from Earth, with text replacing it as the primary method of communication. However, using text can lead to a loss of context i.e. as text is not received in real-time, it can be difficult to understand what a specific text is referring to. However, despite this loss of context, unlike voice, text communication is stored and can be retrieved at a later time.
- As MCC will no longer be able to communicate with crew in real-time and guide them through tasks, the responsibility for day-to-day decision-making will move from MCC to the IV (intravehicular) crew member. The IV crew member will act as the de facto MCC from inside the habitat and guide EV (extravehicular) crew members through tasks like traversal (moving across a terrain) and will have to take on the monitoring, planning, and re-planning that MCC does now. This requires that there be an increased amount of support for IV work.
- Astronauts on deep space missions will have no other human contact apart from each other for extended periods of time. They will also have to depend on each other to keep themselves safe and manage daily activities. Therefore, higher levels of trust must be strived for to maintain morale and crew autonomy.
- Situations in space are extremely complex and individual tasks may have very distinct protocols and procedures. Additionally, communication between different parties e.x. IV-EV, Crew-Doctors are different and have unique requirements. In order for a singular communication tool to be able to support the vast array of comms that take place, it needs to integrate multiple modes to suit different tasks in different contexts with different time delays.
(Space) Walking the Wall
With our affinitizing successfully completed, we suddenly found ourselves with takeaways that could “each be a Ph.D. thesis” on its own. We had broken down the galaxy of asynchronous communication into nine solar systems, but now we were struggling with which ones to explore next, if at all.
“We had broken down the galaxy of asynchronous communication into nine solar systems, but now we were struggling with which ones to explore next, if at all.”
The key issue we were grappling with was the ambiguity of the future state. We had felt this during all of our interviews, but our final SME, a training designer for future space missions, put it into words.
With this project, we are trying to come up with solutions that are dependent on a framework that doesn’t yet exist. Present-day mission protocols, team dynamics, success metrics, technology, etc. are all built around LEO (Lower-Earth Orbit) missions that don’t experience impactful communication delay. These will all ultimately be altered for deep space missions, but that progress is not set to occur for many years. We are essentially in uncharted territory, and many things are still “floating in zero gravity” — even for NASA.
In order to ideate communication solutions for deep space missions, we were going to have to make some assumptions regarding future frameworks and technologies. What types of solutions are more feasible within 2–5 years? Will these solutions become obsolete in 10–15 years? Which problem spaces are worth exploring for long-term, sustainable impact? How far can we push the boundaries of future-state assumptions?
Thankfully, our clients at NASA helped us re-orient and navigate the wall we had hit. We realized that we could start narrowing the scope of our problem ~space~ by utilizing design as a way to move forward and find inspiration for potential solutions.
The trick is to find a balance between ideating for short-term feasibility and for “future magic and robots” scenarios. These ideal, “blue sky” solutions that could be applied to missions twenty or more years down the road require us to envision ideas that may not adhere to current NASA practices. But established methods are only followed until “…some point [when] somebody says ‘I don’t want this red tape anymore.’ And that’s when we move forward.” It’s up to us to get scrappy, get creative, and start setting up the roadmap that will eventually lead to the blue sky and beyond!
But established methods are only followed until “…some point [when] somebody says ‘I don’t want this red tape anymore.’ And that’s when we move forward.”
Back to the Future!
We started our design ideation by creating Future State Narratives (seen below) to capture the headspace of EV, IV, CAPCOM, Mission Planners, Flight Directors, and Science Teams during deep space missions. This involved using our research on these roles to map out who they will be speaking to, and what they will be doing, hearing, thinking, and feeling in these scenarios. The activity helped us keep our users at the forefront of our minds during the design process as well as organize the incredible amount of information that we received about each role.
With a clear picture of our users, we prototyped some potential solutions and organized them from short-term (now-2025) to long-term feasibility (2035 and beyond).
Next Steps 👣
Moving forward, we will be creating storyboards for the scenarios dissected from our prototypes and conducting speed dating sessions with those storyboards. This will give us a better understanding of which solutions and problem spaces we can explore further.
We have also continued to expand and alter our simulated mission protocol (yes, the one we used for our extremely popular LEGO analogous mission!) to encompass the various components of a deep space mission we wish to simulate. As there are more components than can be viably simulated in a single mission, we applied the principle of granularity (introduced to us by our faculty mentors) or breaking down a large element into smaller, more digestible pieces. Our protocol will divide the mission into independent parts each simulating different components and interactions.
Our first objective, based on this new granulated protocol, will be to conduct some quick experiments to find out how people naturally use and create threads in different scenarios. Incorporating threads has been a popular proposed feature for Playbook for many years and we’re excited to see how these analogous missions ~play~ out!
Chronos Communication!
Hope you didn’t think we’d forget to give you some *quality* outer-space content just because we’ve had a busy week!
What an incredible sight. A Hollywood special effect, you’re thinking? But no. It’s for real.
That is the sound of Tom Cruise narrating the 2002 Space Station documentary. This documentary follows astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center as they work to complete the International Space Station. Check it out on Hulu!
Ever wonder what astronauts are doing at this very moment? Tune into NASA’s spacewalk live streams and listen to EV, IV, and MCC communicate in real-time as astronauts Kate Rubins and Victor Glover make upgrades to the ISS! Since we can’t blast off to the Space Station for some real contextual inquiry (yet!), this is the next best thing. Check it out on Youtube!
And finally, to wrap up Sprint 3, we’re using our time off this Friday, to get some R&R and watch The Martian (starring Matt Damon who once again makes an appearance at our movie nights). The film is adapted from the 2011 novel of the same name and follows an astronaut who is stranded on Mars after an accident forces his crew to evacuate and the saga to bring him back home safely.
Signing off for now,
Chronos
Chronos Acronym Dictionary
ARC: Ames Research Center
CAPCOM: Capsule Communicator
CDR: Commander
DCS: Display & Control Monitor
EVA: Extra-Vehicular Activity
F/C: Flight Controller
FD: Flight Director
INCO: Instrumentation & Communications Officer
IVA: Intra-Vehicular Activity
HERA: Human Exploration Research Analog
MCC: Mission Control Center
MD: Mission Director
MS: Mission Specialist
MSCI: Mission Scientist
NEEMO: NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operation
SME: Subject Matter Experts
Opinions expressed are solely our own and do not represent the views or opinions of The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
