Abstract
When designers are tasked with the role of future forecaster, they engage in speculative acts that can be aided through prototyping. These tangible analogues act as a platform for building ideas as well as empathy in an effort to approximate the future activities and experiences of end users. The emergence of space tourism as a viable industry in the near future, will require designers to develop prototyping strategies that emulate these future experiences. To that end this paper reports on the development of a modular prototyping system for the design of space vehicle interiors. As a means of evaluating the effectiveness of this experimental prototyping platform it was deployed in a student class studio setting where designers utilized these elements throughout a team project. The results from this experiment indicate that a modular structure has several advantages across multiple phases of the design process that can translate to future space vehicle design.
Keywords
prototyping, empathy, speculative design, space travel
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.203
Citation
Lund, J., and Germany, J. (2020) Leveraging Empathic Strategies: Prototyping for Commercial Space Vehicle Design, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.203
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Leveraging Empathic Strategies: Prototyping for Commercial Space Vehicle Design
When designers are tasked with the role of future forecaster, they engage in speculative acts that can be aided through prototyping. These tangible analogues act as a platform for building ideas as well as empathy in an effort to approximate the future activities and experiences of end users. The emergence of space tourism as a viable industry in the near future, will require designers to develop prototyping strategies that emulate these future experiences. To that end this paper reports on the development of a modular prototyping system for the design of space vehicle interiors. As a means of evaluating the effectiveness of this experimental prototyping platform it was deployed in a student class studio setting where designers utilized these elements throughout a team project. The results from this experiment indicate that a modular structure has several advantages across multiple phases of the design process that can translate to future space vehicle design.