3.1.    Situations of Privacy and the Problem of Representation

In the first design session the participants—a designer, who will here be called Desi, and an architect, Archie—sat down to design a habitat for four astronauts to stay in during a first “overnighter” on the moon. Two “days” and a “night” on the moon is about 42 Earth days. It was assumed that the crew might be of mixed gender and culture or nationality. The mission would include some scientific investigation and some preparation for future lunar stays. The habitat structure would, necessarily, remain on the moon and need to be adaptable to future missions. The habitat was to be designed to fit within a standard cylindrical module that is being used for Space Station and that can fit in the cargo hold of the Space Shuttle. This module is 25 feet long and 14 feet in diameter. Air locks can be attached to hatches at either end.

Desi is an industrial designer who has been involved with designing lunar habitats for NASA for a number of years. Archie is educated in architecture but has no experience in this specialized domain. Particularly in the beginning, the sessions provide an opportunity for Desi to teach Archie about the domain. The instructional nature of the sessions and the style of interaction between the participants serves well to elicit the design rationale that experienced designers might take for granted. In this way, the design of the study extended the basic technique of “constructive interaction” (Miyake, 1986), in which subjects are paired so that their processes of understanding will be verbalized.

The following excerpt is from the initial session. It is transcribed verbatim, except for the removal of an occasional “um” or “you know.” Of course, it looks more formal and less spontaneous on paper with clear punctuation then when it was haltingly pronounced within the context of gestures, mutual interruptions, and sketching.

This passage formed a critical turning-point in the whole design process. It is worth a close look even though it may not on the face of it appear that “real” designing is going on at the moment. Desi has just sketched his first sample lunar habitat layout, which is represented in Figure 3-1 below. He is emphasizing the large empty space in the center (shaded in the figure) that is available for a variety of uses, depending on the needs of the moment. For instance, beds can fold down into it from the small area marked Sleep at night. Exercise equipment can be set up at other times, or a table for meals and meetings.

Figure 3-1. Initial design of a lunar habitat layout.

This is a complete graphics representation such as could be constructed in Hermes. It is meant as a guide to the reader. Desi’s actual pen sketches evolved as he talked and are less useful as static representations.

Transcript of Lunar Habitat Design Session (Tape B, 33:00):

Desi: You have a big “family room” or “den.” And what they [the astronauts] do is either fold down the Murphy bed or set up cots. But for sleeping you don't dedicate space—since that's only used 8 hours a day and, face it, people's eyes are closed anyway. What you do is provide a place for sleep, an accommodation for sleep. All they need is a horizontal surface. They don't need a private room to sleep, if that's all you're providing.

Archie: On the other hand, there are times when you're waking up or going to sleep and getting your clothes on or whatever, when a modicum of privacy can actually be treasured, and when some people read a book.

Desi: That's another option that we can look at. When you talk about sleep compartments where you can read and work, change your clothes, and do all that, they [NASA] just call them “crew compartments” rather than “sleep compartments” because you're doing more than sleeping. It's just semantics.

Archie: The idea is that it's intrinsically multi-functional?

Desi: Yes. It's multi-functional. It's a crew compartment.

Archie: Is that an accepted idea now? That they should be multi-functional.

Desi: Well, it is an alternative. I'm not saying it's accepted or not. It is what they [NASA] originally pursued or conceived of for Space Station. Each astronaut had an individual crew compartment that had their audio, stereo, video. It had a computer. It had their personal storage, their sleep [area]. It basically was their room where they could go in and work. And they could get away.

Archie: Have they [NASA] moved away from that now?

Desi: In the Space Station module they had about a third of the volume dedicated for sleep compartments only. And in the current configuration—with 25 foot long modules instead of 40 foot long—there is no provision for sleep compartments in the habitat. So it suggests they [the astronauts] are going to be stringing hammocks in the hallway or sleeping in the node. But there is no permanent, individual crew compartment. So they [NASA] have gone from one extreme to the other.

Archie: It's an interesting question. If you cross this 30 day limit, then it seems likely the sleep compartments suddenly become a dramatically higher priority. People start freaking out that they can't get away from other people.

Desi: I would think so. I would think that the idea of being able to get away would be nice. Having that privacy, the control, even if they don't use it.

A mini-drama of argumentation unfolds here around the issue of sleep accommodations in the habitat. Desi makes a first proposal in his initial concept sketch (Figure 3-1). It is to create a general purpose space in the middle of the habitat where beds of some kind could be set up during the sleep period and then cleared away for other uses. This is a relatively austere approach based on the idea that the astronauts will accept pretty much anything you give them. But Archie comes to this with a different perspective. He is not used to the military influence in NASA's attitudes and thinks it is nice to be able to get away by yourself and snuggle up in bed with a good book. Desi immediately responds that private crew compartments are definitely another alternative that they could look at. He points out that the design for Space Station—which offers the closest analog for lunar habitats—originally incorporated crew compartments, although the revised design does not. Finally, Archie argues that being confined together for over a month is qualitatively different from short term missions where lack of privacy can be tolerated more easily. Desi agrees that privacy will be important in designing a habitat for their mission.

Through this exchange, one of the crucial decisions of this design effort has been made: the decision to focus on habitability issues like the need for privacy. The next sections will explore in more detail how such decisions come about, and how they turn out to be important. For now, it might simply be noted that Desi starts the process by presenting an idea that was familiar to him from a tradition of past designs (e.g., recent NASA thinking about Space Station). Archie immediately brings his personal experience to bear, essentially asking, “What would it be like to be an astronaut living in this place for over a month? How would I like that?” Desi then switches to another experience case, the original Space Station module. By now Archie is imagining the social interactions in the confined space, and his notion of privacy grows from being one of life's little treasures to a dramatic necessity for the maintenance of sanity. Desi lets himself be convinced, and spends the next many hours trying to figure out how to carve some private sleeping quarters out of the tiny module (the size of a common living room) that had to contain all the facilities for life and work of four astronauts.

In this way, the framing of the problem and focus for solving it emerge through deliberation of different situations (related, historical, or imagined) from multiple perspectives (Desi’s, Archie’s, an astronaut’s, NASA’s, an emerging shared one). The interpretation of the design revolves around discoveries in the situation. The major discovery made in the transcribed episode is the issue of privacy. The on-going interpretation driven by the need to resolve this discovered issue will lead to many further discoveries. This is the nature of innovative design.

The need for privacy proves to be a major constraint in the videotaped design sessions. The primary problem for the design becomes the conflict between wanting to create a mix of private and public spaces and the need to fit a lot of equipment into a very small volume. Given the importance of privacy considerations in these sessions, it is natural to inquire how NASA’s codified design standards handle the issue of privacy. This is closely related to the question of how an issue like privacy can be represented in a computer design environment. The problem is one of articulating the notion of privacy that everyone understands tacitly, but doing so in an explicit, objectified, and operationalized way.

NASA is a prime example of management by objectives, where issues are spelled out as explicit specifications and regulations. This accounts for its success according to Simon (1981), who contrasts the US's success in placing men on the moon with its lack of success in creating a humane society or a peaceful world. The social problems are truly wicked problems in Rittel's sense; they require deliberation by the many participants in the problem, who have different concerns and ideological commitments. Going to the moon had an unambiguous, highly operational goal enunciated by the President of the United States. The space effort was judged a success in terms of this goal (p.162).

NASA is a major user of computers; the space program actually drove development of mainframe computer technology to a certain extent. One would think that if privacy is the first major issue to come up in the initial videotaped session of lunar habitat design then NASA must have long ago worked out ways of operationalizing this design goal and representing it in computerized design support systems. However, this does not seem to be the case. A first hint of this failure might be inferred from the history of the privacy issue in Space Station. In one design a major allocation of space was devoted to private crew compartments, and in the next there was absolutely no private space. Apparently, the original rationale for designing private spaces was completely ignored or forgotten.

NASA's major opportunity to explore what they call habitability issues was with Skylab, manned orbital missions during the early 1970's lasting up to two months long. In addition to providing a laboratory for studies of outer space, this program was meant to study problems of groups of people in space. Despite this explicit goal, the attempt to design the astronaut's physical environment to be more habitable was strongly resisted in NASA. As described in NASA's own history of Skylab (Compton & Benson, 1983), it was only through the consistent efforts of certain administrators over a period of years that any real design effort was put into this:

Habitability, livability—or whatever name is given to the suitability of the environment for daily living—is, as one NASA designer remarked, 'a nebulous term at best,' one not usually found in the engineer's vocabulary. Besides factors within the engineer's usual responsibilities, such as the composition and temperature of the atmosphere and the levels of light and noise, habitability also encompasses the ease of keeping house, the convenience of attending to personal hygiene, and the provision for exercise and off-duty relaxation. Experience and intuition both suggested that these factors would become more important as missions grew longer. Looking ahead to space station, NASA designers needed basic information on these problems of living in space. (p.131)

During this process a designer brought in to study the Skylab layout from the perspective of habitability proposed the idea of a wardroom, a common space for eating, relaxing, meeting and socializing. The acceptance of this idea was an exception. In general, designing was done by engineers, who focused on purely technical issues. Along with the engineers on their staffs, many NASA administrators saw issues of habitability as threats to their budgetary and schedule goals. Skylab did not have a simple criterion such as the one attributed by Simon to the moon landing, and its planning process was a complex one of negotiation and political maneuvering, despite its confinement within the NASA bureaucracy.

Today, the planning process is even more complex. Architects, sociologists, and anthropologists are being involved. A recent survey was conducted of architecture professors to develop a set of criteria for planning a lunar base (Eichold, 1992). In contrast to the old engineering mentality, the architects felt that the issue of private space was very important. The highest statistic of the survey was that 85% of the respondents listed “balance between community and privacy” as their first or second design preference. The survey report concluded that this emphasis is supported by experience found in the closest analogs for extreme environments and isolation: submarines and Antarctic outposts (see Boeing, 1983; Bluth, 1984; Bluth, 1986). The perspective that Archie brought in the session transcribed above is clearly not idiosyncratic.

Although it is clear that privacy is an issue for NASA missions, it is not so clear that NASA has come to terms with the issue. The recent Endeavor flight launched on September 12, 1992, provides an amusing case in point. The goal of the flight could be characterized as “sex in space”: frogs, fish, wasps, flies, and chicken eggs were taken up to be fertilized and reproduced in space. Yet there were no provisions for privacy for the first married couple to fly together as astronauts. Although NASA made an exception to its rule barring husbands and wives from flying in space together, they went out of their way to assure the public that there would be no human sex in space—a topic that has caused a certain amount of speculation in popular science circles. Press releases stressed that the couple slept on different shifts and were “too busy to even hold hands” on the flight.

NASA has published volumes of Man-Systems Integration Standards (MSIS), systematic compilations of design considerations and requirements for the development of manned space systems. The volume most applicable to lunar habitat design is Volume IV, which defines the firm requirements that are pertinent to Space Station. The most recent revision of this document (Revision A, December 14, 1989) defines habitability as the quality of life in an environment. The basic level of habitability stresses the traditional physical concerns for climate, food, noise, light, etc. But for Space Station, an extended level of habitability is introduced to “take care of the long-term condition of the on-orbit stay time and [to] support not only the individual's physical health but also the mental/psychological health because experience has shown that with the passage of time deleterious effects of isolation and confinement gain prominence” (NASA, 1989b, p.1-4).

Despite this explicit recognition of the need to support mental health under conditions of confinement, the standards provide little guidance for or guarantee of provisions for privacy and sociability. The only mention of privacy is in connection with crew compartments. The general requirement is “a dedicated, private crew quarter shall be provided for each crewmember” (ibid., p.10-8). The ten specific design requirements of the crew quarters are confined to physical, safety, and security concerns, with one exception: “h. Privacy—The individual crew quarters shall provide visual privacy to and from the occupant and acoustic privacy as defined [by reference to quantitative noise levels]” (ibid., p.10-8f). Spatial volumes are specified for allowing for sleep, stowage, dressing, working at a desk, and off-duty activities.

There is even less reference to sociability. The galley and wardroom are discussed solely in terms of food preparation and eating. It is stated that a table shall be provided for eating, but there is no suggestion that it be large enough to accommodate the whole crew at once. There is a separate requirement for a meeting room, although it is clearly intended that the wardroom would be converted to this use as required. Here it is stated that, “The meeting facility shall accommodate a meeting of the entire Space Station Freedom crew” (ibid. p.10-12). This single sentence (with no supporting rationale, references to psychological concerns, or further discussion) is all that exists to encourage designing for sociability. In the new Space Station design the crew compartments have been eliminated. The experience from Skylab shows that the crew often decides not to eat together in order to concentrate on work tasks. Thus, despite a token recognition of the importance of designing a balance of public and private spaces, the NASA requirements are ineffective in capturing this goal.

The need to plan for privacy and sociability arises repeatedly from the task of designing lunar or space habitats to be used for extended durations. It was a controversial priority in Skylab; it was recognized in the early designing of Space Station; it is emphasized by recent studies and surveys; and it came up right away in the design session transcribed above. Yet it has been just as repeatedly resisted by engineers, and is inadequately supported in NASA's requirements document. Even Desi—who prides himself in his concern for habitability issues—tried to end-run the topic in his opening presentation, until he was forced to admit that it was an option, and in fact an important concern.

The question is how a design consideration like establishing a healthy balance of privacy and sociability can be represented in a design support system, whether a manual of requirements or a computer-based system. It is easy for NASA to specify that 53 cubic feet (1.50 cubic meters) are required for sleeping or that noise levels must be kept below 85 dB. Regular CAD drafting programs can check the numeric dimensions of components of a design, and critic rules in a computer-based design environment like Janus (see Chapter 7) can ensure that distances between components are within given quantitative limits. However, it is not so easy to see how concerns for privacy can be operationalized or encoded into requirements that can be supported by computer. It may have been relatively straight-forward to say that we want a man to step on the moon. It is more of a wicked problem to say that we want a diverse group of people to live on the moon for an extended period of time as part of a politically controversial long-range plan to land people on Mars. The problem of supporting privacy concerns in design provides a paradigm example of an interpretive issue that has resisted solution by traditional methods. It will serve as a key example throughout this dissertation.

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