Space4Inspiration: Survival Lab. Designing Countermeasures for Natural Disasters

Abstract

The advances made for spaceflight have influenced almost every aspect of modern life on Earth through spin-off technologies. Looking at the Space environmental context and the crew dynamics we can gain insights and inspiration into how to manage stressful and unpredictable emergency situations. In this paper we enquire into ways that design can help generate countermeasures to enhance our resilience to terrestrial extremes and generate solutions for sustained survival to natural disasters. The extraordinary dynamics in urban populations means that growing numbers of people find themselves in an extreme environmental situation–floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, fire or hurricane. Design for Space and extreme environments provide the transformative lens for applying lessons learned from one extreme scenario to another. What if the design of an emergency habitation module could be transformed into a Survival Lab: a mobile training centre able to recreate analogue conditions determined in natural disasters and prepare people to respond actively?.