People have dreamed of travelling to the stars for centuries. Today's technology has made that a tangible reality, with private companies such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic setting up to take private customers to space. However, before people go to space, they need to understand the differences between a habitable Earth and a colonised moon or planet.
Our project, Beehive, looked at the issues that could arise during different phases of spaceflight, including the colonisation of a new planet. My group and I focused particularly on the management of the essential three facets of life: water, air and food.
Beehive is a seamless monitoring system, proposed to ensure that all new interplanetary spaceflight customers can be aware of their vitals and essential utilities (air, water and food). This would also be paired with a tracking system for the protection of these new passengers, such that an experienced worker could assist them in dangerous situations.
Finally, this was paired with a gamified conservation system to promote saving utilities in a hostile environment, where utilities are not easily accessible.
Our first step in investigating the effects of interplanetary exploration and habitation upon the general public was by researching how military and airlines operate in dangerous situations. Space is a hostile environment for human life, so having a clear understanding of the requirements and protocols in hostile environments on Earth itself was paramount for us.
We spoke to astronauts, pilots, members of the Navy, and the Army in semi-structured interviews, asking questions about air, water and food. Being the three facets of human life which were most problematic to attain in space, we focused our lines of questioning along the research questions:
How do you filter and circulate oxygenated air and water?
How do people know about problems in these systems?
What auxiliary systems are kept in place?
How is food provided to people?
Our requirements gathering process undercovered a number of issues in the way that a number of managers, engineers, pilots and other working men interacted with monitoring and filtration systems.
These were some intricate and technical questions, however the safety of potential consumers was our first priority.
Lack of clear interfaces
Lack of redundancies
Lack of education
Figure 1: The three main pain points identified from interfaces that affect workers in potentially hostile environments.
Using these three pain points, we created three distinct solutions, each tackling a different facet of the three essentials we identified previously. Each idea solved the pain points, whilst simultaneously monitoring and ensuring the safety of each potential consumer.
Concept 1:
Cropital Indoor Farming
Using an app to monitor indoor farming as a measure to protect and conserve the limited plant life in space and interplanetary travel.
Concept 2:
Compete to Conserve
Using gamification to introduce healthy competition for the conservation of air water and food, between neighbouring extraterrestrial habitants.
Concept 3:
Beehive
Using a connected smart-device to monitor and track users in the habitat, ensuring their safety, but also nudging them to improve their conservation habits.
Figure 2: The three main concepts from our ideation phases. Each solution was developed to improve one certain section of our overall problem statement.
Thorough testing with the interview participants revealed that each idea had issues with ease of use and error prevention. We utilised a Pugh Decision matrix to ascertain which solution was most effective in solving our problem, with Beehive coming out on top.
Beehive was not a complete package however. It still fell short of certain aspects of solving our problem on its own. We enveloped features from each of our other solutions into Beehive to enhance and improve the design of our final solution.
Beehive was continually tested on student design peers, tutors and other design experts. We worked tirelessly to create, test and iterate our interfaces to receive the most feedback that we could.
Intricate details, such as the size and spacing of tiles, colours of icons, legibility of text, recognisability of icons and much more were tested:
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Figure 3: Iterations of design, from paper prototypes (left) to high fidelity final solution (right).
Beehive was finally tested on Apple Watches to confirm the usability of our solution, and to check that it fulfilled our initial goal and vision. My group and I presented this to our class alongside a video walkthrough, indicating the envisioned flow of the watch-based interface. You can find the prototype interface here and the video walkthrough here.
Figure 4: Mockups of our final solution on Apple Watches, the expected physical medium for the designed interface.
Figure 5: User Journey Maps representing the emotional flow of users as they use their Beehive product. A green circle indicates a delight point in the experience, while red indicates a pain point.
