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• 1 2022-05-09T23:54:14-07:00 Raymond Loewy and the Skylab Window: Humanizing Habitability Design 16 image_header 2022-05-12T18:16:20-07:00 Often times people ask me what is the single most representative example of artists having an impact on technology in the space industry. I always start with the poetically simple example of Raymond Loewy and the Skylab window (which I hope brings you the same smile it brought when João Montenegro shared it with me). 
  
  Born in 1893, Raymond Loewy was a French-American industrial designer famous for many ubiquitous designs:
  • Air Force One livery
  • Coca-Cola fountain dispenser
  • Concorde interiors
  • Gestetner duplicating machine
  • Greyhound Scenicruiser bus and logo
  • JFK postage stamp
  • Lucky Strike package
  • NASA interiors for Skylab and Apollo programs
  • Logos for Exxon, Shell, BP, International Harvester, TWA, Nabisco, Quaker, New Man, LU and the U.S. Postal Service
     

  “I can claim to have made the daily life of the 20th Century more beautiful.” - Raymond Lowey

  
  In the early 1970s Raymond Loewy was brought in alongside concept artist Syd Mead (who later worked on Tron and Blade Runner) to assist with the habitability components of Skylab, including developing "man–machine interfaces that would make Skylab’s hollowed-out rocket cylinder interior livable", as well as "designing a better toilet, and apportioning spaces for crew privacy and socializing." 
  
  
  The duo's gorgeous concepts were hard for engineers to stomache. One such factor was whether or not to put in a window. Originally, the plan was to just launch in an enclosed space, with the engineers citing factor of safety concerns and practicality.

  "When an observation window was proposed for the wardoom, which had no link to any specific experiment, there was an objection that it was a weakness in the hull 

  However, going to space to sit in a tin-can for days hardly sounds like a pleasant or meaningful expereince. Raymond Lowley recognized it's crucial importance and advocated for it strongly:

  "I insisted that the porthole be installed on a partition so that the astronauts on long missions could have some view of Earth." - Raymond Loewy

  His insistence proved itself soon. In the end, the risk was accepted and the window just over the dining table served as meeting and and relaxation space for astronauts offering "the crews an important view of Earth and the cosmos, and it was the centre of thier relaxation time using the binoculars to aid observations through the window." (Design of Supporting Systems for Life in Outer Space by Annalisa Dominoni).
  

  Jerry Carr was looking out of the window as Skylab passed over the western coastling of the continental United States at orbital sunset. Below him he could see the illuminated kidney bean shape of greater Los Angeles and both bridges of San Francisco twinkling as night covered the ground. [...] This spectacular view, as the golden Sun was surrounded by the velvet black of night, would be one of his most treasured memories of the mission" (Dominoni).

  The window set a precedent that that Habitability was valued above just "survival". However it was far from easy for that to happen. 

  "Architects I spoke with and the archives I accessed locate the problem [of valuing habitability] in NASA’s early years, when people debated whether space capsules “should” have windows. The story of how windows “humanized” space vehicles was passionately repeated to me also by astronauts and designers, who saw “human-centered design” as vital for astronaut functionality and health as well as for enacting spaceflight’s purpose to use spacefarers as situated inhabitants for socially incorporating outer spaces
  
  Despite these efforts, one JSC architect told me, astronauts reported that Skylab interiors were “ugly as hell.” And, like most of NASA’s actual vehicles, Skylab bore almost no resemblance to the space stations imagined by futurist midcentury artists and the man known in some NASA circles as the agency’s first “architect,” Wernher von Braun, whose visions were also translated publicly in the “Man in Space” episode of the Walt Disney Company’s Disneyland television series and in the Disneyland park’s Tomorrowland attraction" (Olson).

  Additionally, Dominoni argues that the designer still failed to emerge as a "key figure necessary from the early stages of product development, because the engineers do not consider priority aspects related to habitability, as we saw in the case study of the Skylab laboratory, in which although there was a part of NASA that was opening up to the concepts of comfort, the internal resistances to Raymond Loewy were still many, like wondering what window was for, even if then, in the end, they realized."
  
  During the 2005 Constellation program, NASA carved out the Habitability Design Center, coalescing this shift in ideology into a dedicated team. The team included a diverse range from artists, designers, engineers, and architects that spent thier days carving, sanding, sketching, and testing ideas. 
  
  In Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth, ethnographer Valerie Olson describes the bustling artistic environment juxtaposed by the surrounding government office hallways:

  "Inside the studio, the unapologetic presence of quirky and refined speculative outer space aesthetics deviated from JSC office decor norms, making the studio look like a mixed-media installation. On desks and tables were piles of lunar habitat drawings made with computer-aided design software, next to books on anthropometry and spacecraft engineering. An astronaut Barbie doll and some sci-fi figurines were propped on shelves, and bulletin boards on walls were layered with renderings of fantastical techno-biomimetic things. A portrait of Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard stuck underneath workaday spacecraft design sketches anchored a wistful sense of what space exploration leadership could look like." (Olson)

  Today the Habitability Design Center continues on as The Center for Design and Space Architecture (CDSA) as per NASA's 2021 webpage on the topic.

  "The Human Health and Performance Directorate’s (HH&P) lead habitability team is comprised of professionals with direct knowledge in human-centered design, industrial design, architecture, aerospace engineering, industrial engineering, and systems engineering [...]
  
  The Center for Design and Space Architecture (CDSA) is NASA's conceptual, human-centered design studio. The CDSA provides customers with advanced concepts for habitats and spacecraft interiors while keeping the needs of the human first and foremost. Using an iterative process, the team matures an idea through increasing levels of fidelity with concept sketches, CAD models, scaled prototypes, Virtual Reality, and full-size mockup fabrication. [...]
  
  Leveraging their expertise in human factors, CDSA designers are often called upon to evaluate hardware to improve usability. Typical design questions include, can an astronaut easily reach all the critical controls if they are in casual clothing or fully suited? How can a seat be designed to conform to an astronaut regardless of their height and body size? What changes in internal architecture are required for habitable environments on the lunar surface versus in microgravity? Addressing these challenges early on in the design phase speeds development and often results in a better product. The CDSA team is often called upon to help oversee field tests of vehicle prototypes as they are evaluated in analogs like the Desert Research and Technology Studies (RATS).  The CDSA has also played key roles in the design and construction of mockup habitats onsite at JSC, including the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA), the 20 Foot Chamber Exploration Atmospheres habitat, and the Crew Health And Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) habitat.

  The lack of much web presence of the CDSA surprised me. The organization has an old pdf summary and the new (2021) webpage on the NASA website with just 3 paragraphs of information for quite an exciting mission and function. However, the existence of the center is encouraging and I'm excited to see the projects that come out of it. 
  
  But what does the work of such an organization mean? Olson examines the post-World War II culture at NASA with the emergence of "habitability" as functional design requirement, and the considerations of what it might mean if humans were treated as a "system" or "subsystem"

   Habitability research continued as architects and industrial designers were enlisted during the agency’s transition to long-term extraterrestrial habitation projects like building space stations. Bringing nonengineers into NASA was part of an effort to increase the “functional integration” of human, machine, and environment understood to determine long-term mission success. These projects advanced NASA’s role in U.S. military and industrial human factors research by focusing on design features geared toward making long-term station tending in hostile environments successful, from the provision of hot water to psychologically correct interior decor.

  The advocacy of "human-as-a-sytem" helped formalize the messyness of being human, keeping it practically front and center in the engineering process. 

  On one hand, designers championed the human system idea, but on the other they argued that design should “drive” systems engineering processes. One soon-to-retire white female engineer branch manager described the problem as a difference between engineering and design ideas about the human system:
  
  I don’t think you can reduce the human to a system in many ways, not in the way that these engineers do that. The typical engineer here thinks a system is, electrons will go through a wire pretty consistently in a black-and-white way, and fluid will go through a tube. Humans are not predictable . . . you have to account for human variability and unpredictability. . . . We advocate for the gray areas here.

  While I was there, an HDC-affiliated Danish designer working on mock-ups in Building 29 collaborated with an HDC worker to advocate for the human to be considered a design “subsystem.” This argument considers the entire habitat to be full of vitally enjoined systems. But in such views the human-as-system cannot be easily quantified or centered. Once again, it falls into the conceptual spatial gaps that anthropologist of place making Kathleen Stewart calls “ideas as ideals,” rich with maneuver room but also haunted by fears that needs and desires might stay “just talk.” In JSC design work, the human system is a metrically defined space-requiring organism but also a Western liberal subject with, as one young white male HDC intern told me, a set of “diverse” properties and needs. People work with the idea that such needs can be anticipated through expert knowledge and verified through the use of astronauts as embodied test-case advisers. (Olson)

  Overall the community at HDC felt that the International Space Station was not a good example of design, and stressed the importance of how designs can enhance the amount and quality of experiments from such orbiting laboratories.

  "Every astronaut on ISS [is] dealing with bad design all day long. And there’s no time to do science, which is what the taxpayer thinks we’re doing up there. . . . NASA was born out of the can-do test pilot spirit, and that’s a wonderful thing, and it’s our heritage, but I think there needs to also be a transition towards these aspects of lliving in space." - Middle-aged white male team manager at HDC

  The challenges are worthy with potential impact beneficial to human health safety and efficiency. 

  Chris, a young white male graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, spoke to me from across his drafting table one day with a pencil stuck in his mouth, telling me he was hopeful about work on “real-world problems such as how to create a space that is perceived as being very wide and having a lot of volume, and in reality it’s actually an idealized volume, really tiny. Because that’s gonna make design history right there.”