Are you a designer or architect who would like to work within the unique constraints of zero gravity? Spaceship designer Susmita Mohanty, who worked on the International Space Station and Shuttle-Mir missions, is teaching an intensive course at Milan’s Domus Academy this summer titled “Zero Gravity Design: Products and Microenvironments for Orbiting Hotels.”
As the race to open up the space frontier to tourists revs up, so will opportunities for designers and architects. The participants of this course will design products and micro environments for living aboard future Orbiting Hotels. The Space Tourists, will have to, after all, eat, drink, sleep, cleanse, exercise, work, play, improvise, relax, move, stay still, contemplate, congregate, seek privacy and look out of the window. These everyday tasks, and more, open up an infinite range of design possibilities….
This course will introduce designers and architects, both students and practicing professionals to the world of zero-gravity (zero-g) design. On Earth, we often take a lot of things for granted, for example – gravity, atmospheric pressure, natural illumination and the entire gamut of colors that it brings to us. Living in Earth Orbit is a whole new world where designers and architects have to account for not just weightlessness and vacuum, but also come up with creative antidotes for isolation, confinement, boredom, sensory deprivation, bone-muscle atrophy, as well as social-psychological-and-cultural stressors characteristic of living in cramped spaces where privacy is limited and so are resources. This course will groom designers and architects to work for space tourism companies.
“Zero Gravity Design: Products and Microenvironments for Orbiting Hotels” (via BLDBLOG)