Can You Hear Me, SOS? Help Me Handle This Request!
Sprint 4: Research Through Design
It’s already week 9! The semester is flying by at lightspeed, and before we know it, our spring presentation will be entering into orbit. This sprint has been all about taking the insights we uncovered through affinitization and using them to fuel our research onwards and upwards. We started off with some reframing, then moved on to validating our understanding of user needs with storyboards and speed dating sessions (no we weren’t swiping right on any Martians —it’s actually a research method!). Lastly, we reevaluated our simulated mission and adapted the protocol to incorporate the concepts we wanted to learn more about. Ready to read more? Then prepare for liftoff!
Back to the Future State! 🚗💨🔮
Reframing
Last time, we touched on the idea that the future state of Mars missions is still up-in-the-air. From our previous research, we had a ton of findings that helped us get a sense of what this future might look like. Here, we created a model to represent our understanding of the current state and future state of communication. With the future state, we are assuming that crew will have increased training and more autonomous technology at their disposal during Mars missions.
Confused yet? We know, this looks complicated! Essentially, in the current state, all sorts of asynchronous communication and information get transmitted through voice loops, Playbook, Mission Log, and various other systems between MCC and the spacecraft. In the future state, we envision that Playbook could be positioned at the center of space communication along with Mission Log and an additional chat hub. One key finding from our background research was that Mission Log was not intended to be a multimedia chat in the first place. It was designed to be what it sounds like — a log or record of the activities conducted during the mission. We believe that by restoring Mission Log to its original purpose and adding an additional chat feature to this communication suite, we can create a more centralized place for communication. This chat could be the home base for all comms — voice loops, video, text, and more — between MCC and crew.
💡 Let’s Get *Conceptual*
Conceptual Prototyping
So how do we pass the stratosphere and get to this future state? Well, first we need to bring our big ideas back to Earth! Last sprint, we brainstormed potential solutions ranging from near future to far-future viability, as well as granular to broad. But to confirm that these solutions actually create value for stakeholders, we needed to create a conceptual prototype.
A conceptual prototype is a “means for validating that teams have identified a problem worth solving.” It is similar to a regular prototype in that it conveys the most important parts of a potential solution. Conceptual prototypes can take many forms — from traditional wireframes to storyboards to movies and more. The main distinction between these prototypes and run-of-the-mill prototypes is that conceptual prototypes are more lightweight.
To start our conceptual prototype, we created 13 storyboards to illustrate the solutions we brainstormed earlier and grouped them by the following themes:
- Chat organization
- Visual indicators on Playbook
- Integration of other tools into Playbook
- Chat features (threads, replies, etc.)
- AI communication solutions
💞⌛ Love in the Time of Delay
Speed Dating
Our storyboards are helping us with speed dating, which is the first step of our research through design stage. Speed dating refers to the process of presenting storyboards that illustrate context, user needs, and a potential solution in a rapid fashion to glean users’ initial impressions and opinions. For our purposes, we want to use these sessions to narrow the scope of our many ideas into a few that we can investigate further in the upcoming weeks, as well as validate our understanding of user needs.
However, 13 storyboards is a LOT 🤯 for one session, and we want to make the best use of our time with our NASA SMEs. So, we created a pre-speed dating survey to help us prioritize which storyboards to present first. This survey is only one part of our three-pronged approach to conceptual prototyping.
By the time I’m writing this post, we’ve got a handful of responses to our survey and conducted four speed dating sessions. We plan to continue speed dating into Sprint 5 as well. But first, some preliminary findings:
- Any solutions that use AI are met with a lack of trust. Rather than wanting AI to automatically perform actions or decisions, users express more openness to using AI in a collaborative manner.
- Threads, replies, and robust search features in a space comm tool are must-haves.
- There is a need to balance the customizability of Playbook while ensuring that users’ attention is drawn to critical communications at the right moment. “Force the critical comms,” says one of our NASA experts.
- Automation in comm technology is a much-desired feature, especially when it enables the crew to focus on the task at hand. (Note that automation != AI)
🚶🏼🚶🏻♀️🚶🏻️Scavenging for Samples
Simulated Missions
Our simulated mission experiments fit snugly into our conceptual prototype approach. While speed dating helps us explore the needs of our users, our simulated missions help us test how the ideas in our storyboards fare in the context of procedure execution in deep space missions. Breaking down what this context looks like and how it can be replicated on Earth among five grad students was a challenge, but now we’re currently running a version of our original experiment! This simulated mission 2.0 is a photo scavenger hunt that emulates EVA scenarios and aims to test how people use threads during EVAs. We hope to collect data on important factors critical to the success of a mission such as cognitive load, trust, situational awareness, and task completion. Although we’re not using Legos at the moment, we have our set neatly packed away in stowage in case we need it later!
Next Steps 🐾
Next on our timeline is more speed dating, more simulated mission trials, and more affinitizing! As we solidify our ideas into something more concrete, we plan to conduct a competitive analysis next sprint to get a better idea of how different communication tools are designed. Additionally, we’d like to examine tools that include design patterns that we might want to incorporate or tools that are used in domains analogous to space. We’re excited to see where our mission takes us!
Chronos Communication
Bees in space? Sort of! We stumbled upon these state-of-the-art critters during our research into autonomous systems on spacecrafts. Astrobees are “NASA’s new free-flying robotic system” aimed at helping astronauts reduce the time they spend on routine tasks. Check out the Astrobees, affectionately named Honey, Queen, and Bumble, here!
The weather is warming up for some of us, so we thought it would be a good idea to find some seasonal ~space~ swag to represent our team! Check out these snazzy NASA Hawaiian shirts here!
Last but not least, our Chronos Movie Nights have been a big success! We had a blast watching The Martian, so next up on our list is Wall-E!
Signing off for now,
Chronos
Chronos Acronym Dictionary
ARC: Ames Research Center
BASALT: One of NASA’s analog mission project to design and develop elements of future missions that could send humans to conduct science and exploration on Mars
CAPCOM: Capsule Communicator
CDR: Commander
CDS: Central Data System
DCS: Display & Control Monitor
EVA: Extra-Vehicular Activity
F/C: Flight Controller
FD: Flight Director
HERA: Human Exploration Research Analog
INCO: Instrumentation & Communications Officer
IVA: Intra-Vehicular Activity
JSC: Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
KSC: John F. Kennedy Space Center
MCC: Mission Control Center
MD: Mission Director
MS: Mission Specialist
MSCI: Mission Scientist
NEEMO: NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operation
SA: Situational Awareness
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)
