A transcript of Episode 213 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Linsday Aitchison from NASA to talk about the process and challenges of designing spacesuits.
This transcript has been machine generated.
Transcript
Per Axbom:
Before we start, we just wanted to say up front. Thank you for listening. We’ve been creating UX podcast now for eight years. For most of that time, the podcast has been produced and run without any external financial support.
James Royal-Lawson:
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Per:
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[Music]
James:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to UX Podcast narrowcasting to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts James Royal-Lawson
Per:
and Per Axbom
James:
with listeners in 186 countries from San Marino to Ethiopia.
Per:
you use the word I haven’t seen before: narrowcasting.
James:
Yeah. Well, you know, before you’d say broadcasting, but we’re not kind of just shooting out our signals across the airwaves to the whole wide world are we. It’s not shortwave radio, we’re podcasters want us to download across the internet to their device.
Per:
But globally,
James:
globally, but it’s it’s a very specific narrow audience. All these lovely UXers and digital workers out there that are listening to us to I’m saying narrowcasting,
Per:
oh we may have to fight about this later. Because I mean, broadcast shows also having narrow audiences, some of them
James:
as many thousands of people listen Per. It’s not it’s not billions, no matter how I count it and twist the figures.
Per:
Dammit.
Per:
Lindsey Aitchison is one of the leading experts behind NASA’s effort to build a next generation spacesuit we got the chance to talk to her at from business to buttons in Stockholm earlier this year,
James:
Lindsay began working full time with NASA back in 2006. And since 2013, she’s held the position of manager of the advanced spacesuit project.
Per:
Right now Lindsey is working within the advanced Exploration Systems Division at NASA headquarters, where her team is working on sending humans back to the lunar surface and on to Mars.
[Music]
James:
As a design it when you look at this as like space to design can straight away think, Oh my God, my world is just really not complicated at all, compared to that world. So I mean, tell us a little bit about the world of designing for spaceships.
Lindsay Aitchison:
You know, I’ve learned that it’s really not that different from any other design problem, quite honestly, you have to lay out your concept of operations. So it defines what you’re going to do from the launch of the crew until they come back home. And once you really lay out that sequence of events, you break it down into smaller and smaller bits and just focus on the design as it goes. So it’s really kind of a straightforward process for pretty big, big design challenge. But it’s really the same as anything else the way you started.
James:
Yeah. I suppose one thing that may be various from a lot of design work that if you I mean, if you’re working with with with digital design, or a website and so on, then you may be aren’t faced with such, erm well the laws of physics as your as your criteria, that must add another dimension to the work?
Lindsay:
Well, for us. It’s pretty normal. I mean, the background that most of the people on our team were aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, we’re used to figuring out how to design machines. And so the physical interface of the machines, but what becomes more challenging for a lot of us is having to not do just a machine that does a job but have a machine to a job for human becomes such an intimate part of what you are and what you’re doing when you wear a spacesuit.
That’s really the challenge for most of our engineers is understanding how to interact with the human. And that goes from everything from test design, to having it come back and just getting feedback from user, how do we do that in a repeatable way, that translates to the design changes that we need to make, because it’s not just somebody can say, Oh, I feel like this one bearing position is keeping me from raising my arm over my head. But the space it is such a sensory experience, it’s almost overload when you’re wearing that, if you don’t understand as an engineer exactly how the suit is designed to move.
You don’t know for sure if that’s what’s really limiting somebody that’s in it, you have to be able to guide them through and understand the questions to ask to see, is it really that thing that they think is poking them? Or is it something else? So it’s how do you understand your hardware, how it feels, how it looks, how it should move, but also how it might be experienced by the astronaut that’s doing the test for you.
James:
I remember there was a there was a TV TV series leave a year it was it was playing it was shorter to apply to be an astronaut training program to be an astronaut. And, and I was really impressive Tim Peake was was part of the show as well at one point. And just this well, astronauts their ability to give detail and and explain things because, you know, they learned scripts, I guess, because doing explorations, doing extravehicular activities – that was hard to say – you need to learn every single detail. How does that impact you getting feedback and research. Do you do you have to work around that or work with it?
Lindsay:
We work with it mostly. So the spacesuit that we use now and International Space Station, we first made the first iteration of that starting with a space shuttle program in the early 80s. And so the idea then is you were doing your spacewalks out of the big cargo bay had the space shuttle. And so that kind of limited what you were going to be asked to do and how you could do it just because it was relatively small. taking that same design, we made a few upgrades, we have the International Space Station.
And so it’s a design that’s been around for almost 40 years now. And so mostly when we’re doing training in that spacesuit, we know so much about it, we have so much experience with it. With multiple, almost 100 different crew members have worn that spacesuit. And so it’s really easy for us to translate comments and work with the crew and train them for those spacesuits. where it becomes more interesting is when we talk about planetary spacesuit design.
That’s something that while our crew has worn spacesuits in space, since the Apollo program, none of our astronauts really know what it’s like to walk in a spacesuit on another planet. Because in microgravity, you’re not walking with your legs, and the task is very different. So how you move is very different when they try on one of our planetary suit prototypes.
Getting the right feedback has been a challenge on both ends, just trying to learn to communicate with each other and how to do that. And I think as we go forward, when we have our design finalized, we will do all the testing to make sure it generally does a full suite of possible jobs because explorations not going to be as scripted. on space station, they train the same tasks. If you’re going to do on space station, you have an exact mission plan, that for every one hour that you expect a spacewalk, you’re going to do six hours of training that in the pool, the big giant pool where we have our space station mockup, when you go on exploration, you don’t know what you’re going to find exactly.
We’re gonna have some precursor missions. So you have a general idea that you go to that area, look for rocks of this shape and size. But things may be different. So the crew is going to be asked to think on their feet, it’s going to be a lot more autonomous. So designing a spacesuit to do that to enable the crew to react to any situation is going to be a real challenge. And it’s going to be something new for both crew and engineers.
Per:
I hadn’t even consider how many different types spacesuits there must be good. So when you were explaining how when when you remove the they’re moving around at the space station, and then when you’re moving around on the moon, completely different situations. How many different spacesuits would you say there are.
Lindsay:
So in actual flight yesterday, there are three now. So you have the online space suit, which is the Russian version of the EPA, spacewalking spacesuit, and then you have the ISS EMU, which is the US version. And then you have the SoCal suit, which is the launch suit that you wear when you’re launching in the Soyuz from Russia. And back when we had the space shuttle Still, we had a separate launch garment that was called the ACS suit. As we go forward, and we’re looking at the Orion crew capsule, which is the next generation for us spacesuits, you’ll have a launcher suit that’s specific to that one. And as we bring on commercial partners, SpaceX and Boeing to start sending crew to space station, each of those capitals has their own launch and reentry spacesuit that goes with it.
Now, once you get beyond there, we talk about actual surface exploration. We have a whole suite of prototypes. We’ve been prototyping, planetary exploration spacesuits, since the Apollo missions we never stopped, right. So you learn a little and you move on our ideal is to try to find a spacesuit design that would work for all of those destinations, which is a big challenge, something that works well for microgravity, but also for the surface of the moon and the surface of Mars.
And so that is one of the areas of focus we have our next generation spacesuit at NASA is creating that one architecture that can do all of those jobs with just a few minor tweaks between each situation. And that’s been a challenge because again, there’s so many operational differences microgravity, to planetary, but we’re learning and it’s a lot more overlap than we expected by testing a planetary suit in those microgravity situations.
Per:
How do you test that?
Per:
I mean, it’s impossible. So I’m assuming you’re, you’re doing risk assessments. And you assume that you can change things along the way, depending on what happens.
Lindsay:
Yeah, so a lot of is, if you think about your space, it kind of like a computer motherboard, where you want to upgrade the sound system when a new video card comes out. Or I’m not very computer savvy. So I’m going to make myself feel embarrassed here. But there are things I know you swap them out when you want to upgrade the computer, right? If you do it yourself without having to buy a whole new computer every time, we want to make your space suit like that.
So we start with just the life support system thinking about, okay, right now on space station, we have co2 removal. So co2, it’s what you exhale, and it’s not good to bring it back in. It’s not pure oxygen. So it’s not great for humans. So we scrub that out. But the way that we do that on space station, it’s a big piece of hardware that at the end of your spacewalk, you actually have to bake it in an oven to get all the co2 that was captured out of it, so you can reuse it. So instead of doing that, we want to use something that is regenerative all by itself, it just is a swing bed. So absorbed in these orbs with the vacuum environment, which is great.
But once you get to Mars, can we really use that same technology, because Mars isn’t a pure vacuum, it’s also a co2 rich, and by so just having it dissolved to the environment will be harder. So we’re gonna have to find a way, we’re going to use that same technology to push the gas through and make sure it goes out because it won’t do it naturally. But having a way that we can just plug and play those systems will make it much easier to upgrade as you go.
Same thing with even just the basic electronics that are in there. We may not have a heads up display in our first version, but we know when we get to Mars, we need a lot more crew autonomy. So having something that just displays on the inside of your helmet or displays on a small fabric display on your gloves or something. We want to have that in the future. So making sure that we leave the space in terms of physical like real estate, but also battery power and all that make it available so that as you go, not an entirely new suit, just little components that can plug and play.
James:
Right. Yeah. So making modular is is basically makes a life easier for the astronauts when they’re going to be unreachable. Exactly during a long mission. I guess as well, it’s, it’s more cost efficient to replace a module than a How much does it cost? It went to millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s something you don’t want to kind of put back into taking the new one switching out an arm? Yeah, I can understand the drivers for that one. You said you don’t need all these prototypes, of course, touch all the time. But yeah, the spacesuits we’re seeing American astronauts were anywhere based on the ones from the 80s or 70s.
James:
So you don’t kind of like just throw them out and start again.
Lindsay:
Now even their spacesuits. So it looks the same as everybody else when it’s all covered up. And it’s white garments, the micrometeorite protection garment, that big white thing you see, but if you undress the suit, as we like to say, and you see the naked spacesuit and all the bits and pieces inside, we’ve actually made a lot of small upgrades over time, even with that suit, we changed the way that the different, like the elbows connect to the shoulders make that easier before they released in when they physically with thread and needles lace together.
Whereas now it’s more like a pickle jar, you unscrew it on one end, and you can pop in another segment. So when you’re on the space station, you can just swap out sizes easily. You don’t have to send it home to get fixed, we’ve changed out the materials to make them longer life. Radiation destroys fabric pretty quickly. And so as materials have gotten better over time, we’re able to make just small adjustments. So the Sumit really has evolved as the space station has evolved to.
James:
So even though you do kind of completely new prototypes that perhaps are radically different. You You still use the information you learn from that test to iterate the exactly based product, I suppose Yes.
Lindsay:
So we do have a base product line, which is the ISS in you. But as we’re learning things in our prototyping lab, if we just focus on one component, like the elbow or the boots, if we make some materials, advantages, advantages, it advances for just that one segment, because we’re trying to solve a problem for Mars. And we realized, okay, that that would work really well today to it’s easy to swap out between the two and make those upgrades as you go. Because there is so much overlap. At the end of the day, especially between the moon and Space Station. I think
James:
sometimes we’re because we will digital, almost entirely them. Sometimes I think we’re too quick to start again, from from scratch, rather than kind of prototyping, allowing ourselves to be very wildly creative with the prototyping but then..
Per:
Making the original product better. Yeah, that’s a sustainable way of working,
James:
Sounds more sustainable
Lindsay:
wasted, still try to step out of the box sometimes and say, okay, we’ve been doing an iterative design approach. And by doing that, are we missing something that would be a giant radical change that would make everything better. So every now and then we do step back. And we work with our academic partners primarily when we do things like that. And so Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they have been approaching spacesuits in a very different way.
They’ve been building off of the space activity to suit design from Paul Webb, which is mechanical counter pressure, instead of having a gash gas pressurized suit with bearings to help you have mobility, it’s just a super skin tight suit that’s applying pressure, just mechanically as opposed to having gas. And so we look at that. We know back in the 70s, it wasn’t really ready yet. It wasn’t a viable option at that time. But it’s like, okay, let’s look at this again.
Is there something that’s changed in the materials available today, that makes this a better option that we should be pursuing? And so we’ve worked with them, we do small prototypes with them and see how much further How can we push this? And so it’s still not quite ready yet. But we keep coming back every now and then to say, have things changed? Has the market changed, and making sure we’re not missing something?
Per:
So earlier today, Jake Knapp was on stage. I don’t know if you have time to see him. But he was talking about one week sprints. Is there such a thing in your in your world,
Lindsay:
not to date. I mean, mostly just because this is a garment, that even in our labs, because we’re working in a pressurized environment, if we don’t take all the proper precautions, you can seriously and injure someone. And so it does require if you’re going to do a full up suited test to make sure that is precision as you go through that it’s not always a quick and dirty thing.
We have done a 3D printing of certain components of the suit. And that is rapid development. not usually a week, we’re pretty proud of ourselves when it’s just a month. But even for us, that’s a big deal just because of how many measurements we take from the body, because we know we’re trying to fit a target population. And so we do the 3D body scans, and we build it all up in CAD.
And 3D printing itself is not super fast when you’re talking human sized portions. And then you have to actually stitch them together because nothing is quite available a little do that one go all the way through. So there’s a little bit of extra work when you’re doing it for human. But we do have some more rapid, but definitely not a one week sprint that we have today.
James:
Given even the the risks of even doing testing, like you said, what kind of routines Do you have audio? Well, how do you test your test or if you are design, what kind of checks do you have to do to to even know that it’s safe enough to go to prototype stage.
Lindsay:
A lot of it starts with we have some basic set requirements in terms of the strength of the materials, when you’re looking at before you put a human in it, we do bursts test to make sure that if we’re going to operate at a specific pressure that it can withstand a safety margin Well, you fill it full of air or water, either one, depending on where we’re doing the testing to say, the strength of materials, the way that you’ve done, those seams are going to last. And that’s one of the things it’s not just the base material. But it’s also how you join the two pieces of fabric together. And make sure that those hold well above what you expect to actually be testing at.
The same thing goes with how you interface the soft goods to the hard goods, that transition tends to be very difficult for fabrics. And so again, going through there and making sure that the strength of materials from your toes through your helmet, even if you’re only changing one small thing can have a ripple effect all the way through in terms of the load path. Also, it’s how do you choose materials that you know aren’t going to off gas. And so off gassing is a big problem when you go to reduce pressure, especially chemicals leach out of the material sometimes, right? So some some part of what is made of decides it’s not going to be there anymore. And race itself.
Lindsay:
It’s that new car smell, right? Yeah, that’s really the off gassing of chemicals. And so if you do that inside of your spacesuit, you don’t want that new spacesuit smell, because that’s actually going to be toxic to people at that sort of level, when you’re bringing it in.
James:
New spacesuit smell. You can bottle that.
Lindsay:
they’re trying to get that out first and make sure that once you’re in that enclosed environment, a very small space that everything that we’ve chosen is going to be safe. The other The biggest thing that we think about though, our materials compatibility for an oxygen environment. So we operate with 100% oxygen inside of our spacesuits, the prototypes, we start with just breathing air, because it’s safer. But ultimately, you go to oxygen, and having 100% oxygen makes everything a lot more flammable. So it’s a matter of whatever you’re putting near that oxygen environment. We keep very low power sources inside of the spacesuit. And so we limit any sources of ignition, and then try to choose materials that are going to be the least flammable within that environment,
James:
not the materials that don’t want the reactive oxygen or, have a problem doing it.
Lindsay:
Right. But if you look back at the Apollo one disaster that happened, part of that was because the entire capsule was at 100% oxygen, so it was just really a flame. Flames want that oxygen is the fuel for flames. And so we learned a lot from that, and especially how we pick materials for our spacesuits is partly from that experience.
James:
And one thing I realized talking to you is the the knowledge inheritance, so how you pass knowledge down generations in NASA must be must be important part of your training, because you’re saying things using way and and talking about events that happened around about time I was born and raised. Yes. before you were born probably as well. Yeah, very efficient process.
Lindsay:
It is a very small community, both within NASA and the broader community across industry and academia. We’re pretty small community. So we do share a lot of lessons on both directly through, you know, workshops annually, where we sit there and talk about wherever we made progress, what do we still need to do?
So there’s that, that even within the community in which I grew up in spacesuit engineering, it is so small that basically the mentor when I first started, he started working at NASA in 1952, when it was NASA, so before it became actually NASA, and he’s worked on every spacesuit project since Gemini. And so the lessons that he learned, he lets us fail, because part of learning is failing. But once you do, he’s like, Okay, so this also happened to us back in Apollo. And here’s what we learned, then. Is it different now? Did you learn a different lesson? Or is it the same thing, and so we can really take that inherited knowledge and build upon it.
And we do keep design data books, so that if you want to reference something we’ve done in the past, we can look it up. And we’re trying to do a better job of that, because our teams are expanding, and a space becomes a larger endeavor with more and more people involved, as we hope it will want to make that information available. So that’s one of our challenges is figure out how to take that corporate knowledge, if you will, and make sure that everybody can also use that so that we can move our designs forward as opposed to continue just like repeating the same stuff.
Per:
And that does sound like a fantastic work culture. Because with that experience, you some people maybe would say, We’ve tried that, don’t try it again. But you’re allowed to try it and see, did you learn the same thing? Or did you learn something else from failing? Exactly, plastic? You keep touching upon something that is there, you start by saying so the design process released quite similar across industries.
But I mean, here lives are on the line. And you said something that resonated with me, because I, I always say that, so but it’s not lives, maybe that are on the line, but you always affect a lot of people with design. And you said something along the lines of with everything that becomes helpful. There are consequences that must be dealt with. Can you just explain what you meant with it?
Lindsay:
One of the easiest examples for me is thinking about the Apollo spacesuits. And we look at those spacesuits. And it looks clunky, it looks like your astronauts are not particularly graceful, they’re falling down all the time. You have dances one of the ones we like to call where the Cobra drops his hammer, and he spends time hopping to decide hop into the side trying to pick that hammer up off the ground, it takes him five minutes. And so we’re like I we don’t want to repeat that.
That’s harder, the crew that’s hard on your spacesuits, let’s do it better. So we added bearings throughout the hips. And now it gives you a very graceful way to open your hip, you can kneel down, controlled stand up, it’s very easy. But that added around 20 pounds of mass to put all of those bearings. And so it becomes not only a problem for just launching it there, but it also limits now I can no longer wear that same suit.
On the rocket, when I leave Earth, the Apollo suit I could wear when I left Earth because it was lightweight enough that if there were a problem on the ground, I can still unbuckle myself and walk away, right. But now my suits too heavy to do that. So it’s a consequence of that design. It makes it way better for this one use case, but I can no longer use it in the other. And so it’s finding the compromise there.
Per:
Thank you so much for joining us. It was so much fun.
Lindsay:
My pleasure.
James:
Thank you.
James:
At the very beginning, towards the beginning anyway of our chat with Lindsay, I say to her that, you know, she’s, her design world is constrained by the laws of physics.
Per:
Because ours isn’t Of course,
James:
exactly. Reflecting back it’s kind of like, wow, you know, most people in digital design, you know, we’re we’re we’re trans dimensional beings who clearly aren’t, you know, just restrained by these pesky laws of physics.
James:
Not really, quite what I meant. But erm..
James:
I think what I was trying to say that was it for us. The laws of physics are not normally a kind of upfront criteria. It’s not like we, we write it in, you know, in stories in JIRA kind of thing.
Per:
Oh, yeah. Remember, you remember to factor in the laws of physics, but also for her philosophy, physics change, as well, which is interesting. So yeah, that’s why it matters that it goes until
James:
they don’t change Per, they don’t change.
Per:
Oh, but you know what, I mean, the environment changes.
James:
Yes, they the ones that are applicable, and become more applicable in certain situations.
Per:
So gravity, for example?
James:
Yeah,
Per:
I’d say it changes according to environment.
James:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is various things change between planets, a planet and how you walk on the moon is different to how you walk on the on Mars. You know, temperature and pressure, all these things? They’ve this, the environmental situation varies a lot within the laws of physics. But I’ll be Yeah, okay. A lot of this episode, there was a bit of a physics and chemistry lesson going on. But
Per:
I love it. Yeah,
James:
I loved it. And I love the kind of, you know, when design is designed, and we all have constraints, and you know, what constraints are more relevant have are critical from design product design projects. Very. But, you know, the Cindy said, our opening answer, you know, it’s a very similar design process to what we generally would use.
Per:
Yes, it really is. And I think we can always learn from each other. The way they design maybe is more relevant to the way we design as well, there is their stuff they’re doing. Like they they are having, like you said to me earlier, quality assurance, you have to have that before you do with the user testing.
James:
I mean, that fascinates me that, you know, we we push and highlight the the value of gorilla testing or just getting out there. And we’ve encouraged people over the years, like, you know, you take a paper prototype or a clipboard and go into a, you know, Starbucks or shopping center and just get some info, get some feedback. If they put the astronauts in to the spacesuit that’s not quite safe enough, they can they can die. You know, things connect, blow up, explode in the set on fire. There’s a lot of stuff that generally for us, we don’t really need to think about.
Per:
Now I’m thinking of them. I mean, if in the science students, they would have to sit with small dolls and experiment with the different suits and see if they, you can basically have a doll, that would be their design spin. Because Well, yeah.
James:
But then you have to design the doll to make sure it can give you the data you need to test.
Per:
So you’re still you’re still stuck, you’re still stuck with having to do it in the correct way. In the end.
James:
Yeah, see, you’ve got a backup to make sure you’ve got all the right components in place to make sure it’s it’s a safe test and the safe test that gives reliable data.
Per:
I do have to mention, okay, so this was sort of, I am not I know you love the fall of NASA and everything that’s going on and and but when we’re talking going to talk about spacesuits, I in my head, of course, and I think a lot of people have this in my head, of course, I have the white space suit that you see in front of you and all the pictures and, and all the films, but she actually did mention this, she called that she called the big white thing. The big white is like the outside layer, there’s so much going on underneath that white layer.
James:
Yeah, I mean, that’s because Lindsay works with the the, the the spacesuits that you take outside into space. And they are pretty much always white, because of course, they have to be white to reflect the sun. And that’s just the outside layer or the this dislike, I don’t know how many layers but you know, you’re into double digits of layers of material under that white surface that do other things. Not only keep, you know, keep the the atmosphere inside the spacesuit, but also stop things like or protect them from particles of dust ripping through the spacesuit and killing
Per:
Oh, yeah, that was awful to hear.
James:
I mean, there’s all that kind of stuff that they have to think about. But I think it’s, you know, we think sometimes about some spaceships and not white, you’ve got the blue ones, that it was a thinking the Apollo missions, and they didn’t, especially if they sign off, it was orange, your blue, blue, depending whether when they’re launching, they’ve got things that aren’t really special news that just kind of jumpsuits, all that, yeah, fighter fighter pilots. And
Per:
she was talking about different suits for different parts of the journey as well.
James:
Yeah, different ones that are in use at the moment. I’ve got it, I’ll put a link in that to the show notes. So the ones that are currently in use, and things like four or something I think she mentioned,
Per:
that didn’t make me think of how that was a great metaphor. For me, at least with the complexity, you see the outer layer, you see the white outer layer, and that is the website. But for that website, or our digital service to work, there’s so much complexity going on underneath that we need also be to be taking into account, probably more so than most designers do. Actually. Yeah.
James:
And also that you’ve got a user, the space, the astronaut inside the product space. So behind that, there’s hundreds of people involved. Yeah. And that’s how it isn’t designed situations, it’s hundreds of people involved behind the scenes. And also that it might look, it looks like a space. So it looks You know, it from been kindergarten, the primary school or whatever you can you can draw a specimen, you have a very clear idea of what a specimen looks like. So you kind of take it for granted.
And we get that I think a lot that people said, Well, you know, that’s obvious. And the things that we’ve we’ve suggested, and it’s very easy to dismiss the design process, you know, the research, the the hypotheses, the the the data collection, the confirmation that our guess that maybe seems very obvious, actually is true and applicable in the design situation for the problem that we’re, we’re facing?
Per:
Exactly.
James:
Well, I was reflecting as well on how Lindsey mentioned this the size of their community. And that was a very small community. And also, because they have direct access to their their end users. But it made me think about the work we do in enterprise UX work with expert users. And, and how, how different is maybe to some of the kind of product websites or public websites are very, very broad, as opposed to narrow audiences.
Per:
So you’re saying I mean, you can go and talk to your users anytime a day, really, and get some feedback on something?
James:
Yeah, I’m it also, but also. So I think about that connection to the work with with with that kind of enterprise, internal systems and so on. But then I took the next step, I thought, well, NASA doesn’t have a kind of business model that she’s doing designed to solve a problem. They’re not doing design to enable a business model to make money from solving a problem. And, and thinking and reflecting about how that frees up the design process. I mean, okay, they’ve got a budget, okay, they’ve, they’ve got maybe, deadlines and so on. But But at the end of the day, they don’t need to convince the astronauts to buy their suit.
Per:
That’s true. But given as we were talking about in an interview as well, given the immense, immense costs, I was hugely impressed by the attention to actually reusing older spacesuits that actually, some of the Apollo suits were still in use the way I understood it. That’s amazing. So I mean, obviously, they need they have some sort of constraints there. So I agree. There’s no business model. But there’s there are other constraints.
James:
Well, isn’t isn’t that actually knowing we don’t have Linda here now to ask, but isn’t that actually connected to the fact that they have a huge amount of respect for the for the care and attention and effort that’s gone into solving aspects of the problem earlier?
Per:
I love that. I love that take on it. I hope that’s true.
James:
So so you know, you’re not going to throw away the elbow joint, because they’re acutely aware that the elbow joint has been iterated and developed for 40 or 50 years. Yeah. And now that ties into what I brought up about how I think we are really too quick to throw things away. And, and, and, okay, this is a healthiness in rediscovering things. Lindsay yourself points out where the way she said about the mentors allow them to fail. There’s there’s a great deal of value in failing. But I think you’ve got to, you’ve got to fail with the right thing and or to learn rather than fail with things where the cost of going through that failure to learn is really too big.
Per:
Yeah. Because when you’ve been in this industry, for a while, you’ve everyone’s been involved in a project where you, you scrap a tool to build something completely different. And in many, many cases, you actually, the old tool is never really completely scrapped, because it can do something that the new tool can do. So you’re just adding complexity all the time instead of thinking about. So we learned a lot about the needs of the users, how can we use the old tool to solve these problems? and build on that?
And I would like to see that more, much, much more under the silence. That type of thinking. Yeah. And speaking of learning, I mean, this, it blew my mind, that kind of respect that her mentor had for her when she was allowed to fail. Time and time again, he did, because he knew probably what would happen. But it was more like he was also curious about what that happened again, in many cases, in organizations, you have people who work there a long time. And I said, we try that. So you need to try it again. Here is obviously an early learning environment where everybody is allowed to fail at their own pace, which is fantastic to hear.
James:
I know that just the story story to do with mentoring and knowledge transfer. That probably is is the story of us most during the spring, after
Per:
oh nice
James:
hearing, Lindsay because it’s I think it’s a lot to be to be learned from me comes up all the time for us kind of like how do we transfer knowledge between us? How do we how do we work sustainably? How do we document I mean, none of us like documentation. You know, developers love documentation. So the whole thing about what do you do to to maintain or to keep hold of that value? You’ve carried it through knowledge?
Per:
Oh, yeah, that really shows how important it is to actually have people stay on for for a while with their company. I mean, I have clients where I’m one of the people who has worked there the longest, which is kind of blows my mind sometimes. So I’m sort of a senior, but I’m a consultant, and then advisor. But the documentation as you’re saying, it’s not there, the best thing for them would be to invest in me spending more time documenting.
James:
Yeah, and I think that’s that’s the point, it’s not solely the length of time you’ve been there. That’s, that’s critical there. It’s it’s, I think, a culture of continuous handover. I mean, we know that developers find great value in pair programming, and I don’t mean programming with you. I mean, I’m sitting together in twos and programming, you know, as a mini team
Per:
that’s going on my CV, I’m an expert in Per programming.
James:
We know So, so that whole thing about kind of constantly handing over knowledge, not just when you’re at the end of a project, and not just kind of like when you quit your job, or change change job, you know, there’s something needs to be done every single sprint, week, month, you know, solution, whatever. Because then it reduce it increases the lifetime of the knowledge. It makes it more accessible and, and stops it from dying. Yeah, advancing.
Per:
I’m going to give a give a word of advice there that I’ve given you before on the show, but I was long time I go, I think doing video recordings of sprint demos has been immensely useful in a lot of projects I’ve worked in, where you actually record all the sprint demos, especially in larger projects, every third week, you record a half hour demo of the product, explaining all the things that have been done and why during that sprint, and people who have come in and out of the project, I have been able to watch those films and get up to speed really fast. So actually, that way of documenting is something that I really recommend.
James:
Yep. And that is excellent advice. And also now I think some of the some of the ultimate tools for creating transcripts have come long enough and far enough so that you can actually get a pretty searchable and good transcript from those videos sessions. quite low cost. Oh, excellent point. Yes, please subscribe to the show. If you don’t already. Our entire collection of episodes is available on Spotify and on the website. And if you want the suggestion of what to listen to next, then it seems quite fitting to go all the way back to Episode 25 which was in 2012. When we talked to Nathan shed off and Christopher cell about interaction design lessons from science fiction.
Per:
Remember to keep moving
James:
see you on the other side.
James:
Actually not going to do a Knock knock today for you.
Per:
What!?
James:
It’s still a joke. It’s all right. Are you ready?
Per:
I’m ready.
James:
Okay.
James:
What do you call a robot that always takes the longest route?
Per:
I don’t know.
James:
R2 Detour.
Per:
Oh, no.
[Laughter]
[Music]
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Lindsay Aitchison recorded in May 2019 and published as Episode 213 of UX Podcast.
This transcript has been machine generated.