‘In London there are so many designers, it’s just as ridiculous to say I am going to be a graphic designer, as it is a space designer’, says Regina Peldszus. The German-born graduate of Central Saint Martins has spent the last seven years researching and designing for long-term, manned spaceflight habitability. She has collaborated with international space organisations, from the European Space Agency (ESA) to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Her work ranges from the mundane concerns of boredom in long space missions, to the real-world applicability of sci-fi film sets.
‘As a designer there is no set route for doing this job, I did a BA in arts management, then a Masters in design studies at Central Saint Martins’ says Peldszus. It was during her Masters that Peldszus decided she wanted to pursue her lifelong passion for space design, applying for PhD funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council while working as a design intern in China. The application was successful, and the recent completion of her PhD at Kingston University is another step in Peldszus’ journey that began as a child fascinated with science fiction. ‘The street I first lived on in Berlin was called Cosmonaut Street,’ she says. ‘As a child I had a poster of a section through the Starship Enterprise, I was fascinated with the living quarters and how it was occupied.’ Peldszus now operates out of a shared office space with design collective Supercollider in Dalston, London. They often collaborate and convened a space architecture symposium together at last year’s London Festival of Architecture.
The freedom and financial stability provided by the PhD offered Peldszus an opportunity to define the role of a spaceflight designer in her own terms. Her work can be broadly categorised into three areas: research and development for manned spaceflight; design consultancy for live industry products; and outreach projects that bring Peldszus’ ideas and those of other space designers and strategists to the general public. ‘My work is about establishing an applied framework that will define a new design practice. It is an incubator for ideas that are tailored to my interests and plug the gaps of what still needs to be researched.’
Peldszus has clearly found a niche. With the commercialisation of many space programmes, the emphasis on research
and application of design is largely focused on the comfort and aesthetics of short-haul manned flights. Despite the scaling back of funding for government-led space programmes, the European Space Agency still foresees manned exploration missions to Mars being undertaken by 2030, NASA and Russia envision it happening sooner. These missions will involve a crew living in a capsule habitat for around 500 days. Aside from the physical risks of sustaining life in a hostile atmosphere, Peldszus’ research examines the minimisation of psychological challenges and stressors. Equally, much of the investigation into human response to space travel, outside of medical and physiological study, comes from anecdotal evidence. The Goldberg report of 1987 warned of the lack of objective data on the behavioural responses of crews on space missions, and highlighted that, in time, with larger crews and longer missions, the dangers need to be fully understood. Studies into the long-term effects of isolation, such as the projects in Utah and Moscow, are now providing an avenue for research that, until now, has remained abstract.
‘The people who worked on the early missions are retiring now. NASA leaves a long paper trail, the Russians don’t. There is a lot of tacit knowledge, getting hold of it is difficult,’ says Peldszus. Part of the designer’s success is down to finding ways to introduce her studies into existing or planned experiments. ‘You have to hijack what is already going on’, she says with a smile. One of the key areas of study affecting these long-term missions is the autonomy of the crew. Peldszus’ work examines how the highly engineered spacecraft and life-support systems can promote the psychological well-being of the astronauts through human-centred design. In Peldszus’ words, ‘We are looking for the ambiguity in the systems, areas that can be examined beyond their immediate application, which can improve the well-being of the crew.’
Her work encompasses the physical design of environments, the creation of games, the habitability effects of growing plant life in microgravity as well as the role of science fiction films as scenarios for psychological habitability. It looks to minimise negative behaviour in astronauts through the application of known techniques that promote mental well-being.
One of Peldszus’ most recent projects was a study into the olfactory environment of crewed spacecraft. The tradition has been for spacecraft to be designed as odour neutral. In the closed environment of the Habitability Project on Sensory Stimulation in Space in Utah, Peldszus undertook an experiment with Irene L. Schlacht, of the Man-Machine-Systems Group in Berlin, into the responses of isolated individuals to specific smells. Odour causes multiple psychological responses, from triggering memories (known as the Proust Effect) to altering the perception of the immediate environment. This basic trial supplied the crew in the project with a series of vials of specific odours. ‘Initially, the crew was dismissive of the trial,’ says Peldszus, ‘yet as time went on they found the smells to be evocative and invigorating.’
The implementation of stimuli that reduce the feelings of monotony and isolation is also explored in another of Peldszus’ studies. Along with Ralf Heckel, of the International Space Education Institute (SEI), Leipzig, she developed a clothing line that provided variation from the standard mission uniform. The clothing programme gave the crew control over their appearance and also broke up the monotony of routine; there were even items designed to be worn on special occasions. ‘The physics of space travel does not allow life on Earth to be replicated. The luxury of being able to wash or replace clothes is not possible. So the variation has to be in place before hand’. It is the introduction of surprise, variation and delight to a system that is perceived as finite or closed. ‘Personally, it’s not about designing one single thing, there are so many variables’, says Peldszus.
In 2010, the AIAA published a paper by Peldszus, Professor Hilary Dalke (Peldszus’ PhD supervisor) and Dr Chris Welch (part of the Astronautics and Space Systems Group at Kingston University) entitled ‘Science fiction film as design scenario exercise for design habitability: Production designs 1955-2009’. This explored speculative design in science fiction, placing particular emphasis on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The study recognised that the scenarios depicted in science fiction, particularly Kubrick’s seminal film, were the product of many years of consultation, research and development by multidisciplinary design teams, which were comparable to those working on the scenarios predicted for long-term spaceflight. Through this study, conclusions were drawn about the general environment and interior colours of spacecraft, the organisation of activity zones, the provisions available to crews, entertainment and leisure activities. The findings within the fictional narratives, when analysed alongside the reality of completed or ongoing missions such as the ISS, could then be integrated to create more robust mission scenarios.
For some, Peldszus’ work might appear outlandish and speculative, but the research liberates our understanding of the everyday as well as providing frameworks for mankind thriving beyond Earth. ‘Spaceflight will change the way we look at our world,’ wrote Peldszus in Looking Over the Edge (2007). ‘By seeing things we take for granted in a different light, we abandon set ways and prejudices… The insights of human spaceflight make citizens look over the edge. Not just the edge of our earthly atmosphere, but above all, the edge in our heads.’
