singsign

Human Factors on Mars

March 6th, 2008

The Mars Desert Research Station project is fascinating in all its enthusiastic, slightly nerdy, and energetic frenzy to find out what it would mean to live on Mars. Now, they have also had a socalled FLAME (family living analysis on Mars) team out in the Utah desert for some research on what it would mean having a family living on Mars. Aside from the expected (primary geological) research, the FLAME team is focused on psycho-social aspects of living together, of coping with frustration and other interesting issues. Perhaps designing for interactions with smart environments on the Mars habitats, creating better potential for peacefull co-habitation in a tincan placed on one of the more unforgiving places in the solar system will come to be a major challenge for human-factors specialists and HCI people sometime during the next decade. I do hope, however, that they will recruit beyond the usual suspects in space exploration: engineers, biologists, and other natural scientists. If people are supposed to live, work, and enjoy themselves in a hermetically closed, high-tech habitat (a wicked problem if there ever was one), input from the “softer” (man, I hate that adjective) sciences will be extremely valuable. Anthropology, sociology, even psychology + a healthy dose of design thinking will be needed if we’re one day supposed to reach the stars!

Entry Filed under: HCI, Tech, Control, Ubiquitous computing, Everyware