Sustainable Life Beyond Earth. A design driven living lab to create new human experiences in the space habitat.

In the coming decades, human presence in space will expand and new space stations and pressurized habitats will be built. This trend will require a rethinking of the interior design of space habitat. New challenges will arise about customization and organization of these spaces, to ensure the well-being and a better quality of life for travelers. It will be important to maintain performance over long periods of permanence, as well as to generate sociality and individuality within these spaces, considering also how experience and the type of users who can access these journeys could change. This new approach requires, on the one hand, to put at center of the process the improvement of current and future crew experience, considering well-being from multiple points of view (physical, sensory and perceptual interaction), on the other hand to consider not only the dimension of environmental sustainability but also the social dimension linked to the concepts of responsible innovation (ethics, gender equity, inclusion, open access, etc.). Enhancing the current state of the art on space life, analyzing the digital tools used for simulation processes, charting case studies of space economy-related projects, product and material innovation, design methodologies, but also outof-domain scenarios, is crucial to identify potential future sub-assemblies, more sustainable technologies, and innovations for the development of more functional space habitats. The project, starting from this collection, aims to create a collaborative working tool between researchers and the business to intersect knowledge, collect good practices inside the space economy but also out of domain, and rework them from a predictive and continuous innovation perspective. This tool, called the “Sustainable Innovation Observatory for Life Beyond Earth”, is a design-led living lab that, through interdisciplinary research guided by a human-centered design and a responsible advanced design approach, highlights future areas of innovation, possible development trends and can support designers in developing new habitat configurations and new internal product systems. The construction and testing of the tool have been done within an applied research project involving the University of Bologna (across different disciplines) and Thales Alenia Space Italy (TASI) company. In fact, thanks to the integration of knowledge, skills, technologies, methodologies, and people, it has been possible to cross-reference data coming from the scientific literature covering multi-disciplinary fields with those actively coming from the context of reference, creating this new working tool to be applied within TASI.