The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design
Image: 1975 NASA paper about sustainable space stations.
In the course of that talk, then, I ended up talking about space stations and in fact closed systems of all kinds. This is a diagram from a 1975 NASA paper about building a sustainable space station. You see the atmosphere is at the top here, and plants and food and food processing and people are all here, drawing from the atmosphere and each other, and everything is re-cycled. It’s a map of how to create a closed, self-sustaining biome.
It may not have escaped your notice, from the title on the first slide, that this is a talk about design.
In particular, one of the approaches I’m going to use is how to take a metaphor and extend it to breaking point, cross-fertilise it with a traditional piece of consumer electronics, and use that to come up with new product ideas.
In particular in particular, when I was giving that science fiction talk, I took the idea of the closed system, and applied it the desktop scanner. And this is what I came up with.