Form follows story: An approach to designing for commercial space travel

Abstract

Designers are increasingly taking on the role of future forecaster. As a result, the problem of future framing and designing for experiences that have not yet materialised is something that educators are beginning to introduce into regular design and engineering curriculum. This paper disseminates an approach to designing for this emerging future through an industry collaborative course that explored commercial space travel for the year 2030. To approach the intangible experience of space travel, students were challenged to consider activities and environments that were far removed from their everyday experiences. Unlike some traditional user-centred research methods, this course asked students to develop their own empathic and immersive research methods. These methods were then leveraged to develop journey stories as a launching point for the actual design concepts. Coupling these two problems framing strategies of empathic immersive research and storytelling exposed both benefits and some challenges.