The Astronaut Ethnography began as a design research project created by Sands Fish while working as a designer at the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
The motivation of the project was to unlock insights about the counterintuitive nature of the weightless environment that astronauts live in while in spacecraft and aboard space stations. With the foundational design constraint of gravity removed, how did design change? How would material culture evolve? And how can designers gain an intuition about designing for this environment without the benefit of being physically present and having the embodied knowledge they rely on when crafting solutions and innovations.
The project interviewed astronauts who had spent time living on the International Space Station (ISS), in addition to designers working within the aerospace industry to understand the nuances and surprises that come along with designing for the microgravity environment.
That project evolved into what is now called the Astronaut Ethnography, a project that asks a broad set of questions about what it is like to call outer space home, and how we envision the future of life on orbit.
You can learn more about the project at:
https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/astronaut-ethnography/overview/
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly on the International Space Station shows off his personal living quarters in space