3.2.    Perspectives on Privacy

The concern for privacy in the lunar habitat came up again and again in the taped sessions. Several minutes after the discussion cited above, the following dialogue took place. In it, one can see the designers struggling to construct a situation of privacy by bringing different experiences and perspectives to bear and reframing the meanings of terms to develop a shared language. The transcript in this section is broken up for the sake of exposition, but it took place continuously except for pauses to sketch. The sketching was largely gestural, to accompany the discussion of specific features—the drawings below are more schematic and less dynamic, but should help the reader to visualize the layouts being discussed.

As shown in Figure 3-2 below, at this point in the designing private crew compartments have been added at the left end of the lunar habitat module. They are arranged like two bunk beds along the walls, providing accommodations for the four astronauts and leaving a corridor open through the center of the module for access to the hatches at the two ends. All the areas requiring plumbing have been located together along one wall, leaving a large area open for meeting, eating, exercise, and work activities. A table and chairs have been sketched in as a multi-purpose ward room, surrounded, perhaps, by work stations containing computer screens and panels for communication and control, or for other sit-down work. Another area has been left open for experiments, research, etc.

Desi has placed the toilet, shower, and galley together to conserve on plumbing connections, which are more complicated in the moon’s low gravity than on Earth. But he and Archie immediately discover some problems with this arrangement. Namely, the toilet encroaches too prominently visually on the eating area and acoustically on the sleeping area. They start moving things around in the layout. Buffers are added to provide visual and acoustic privacy, often by strategically locating storage closets. (Lots of storage will have to be designed in at some point anyway in order to hold all the provisions for a month and a half.)

Figure 3-2. A layout for living and working.

Transcript of Lunar Habitat Design Session (Tape B, 42:00):

Desi: Okay, this is the shower here. This is the galley. This is the toilet right here. [See Figure 3-2.] Assuming that the entrance in and out might be right here. One of the things about privacy...?

Archie: Yeah?

Desi: . . . One thing I hate about my office is that right out of the reception area, the secretaries are sitting there facing the bathroom door. It's like you're being watched.

Archie: Well I think this is problematic. Right here you've got the toilet right open into the open area, where meals are probably consumed and all.

Desi: That's awful! The potential here is that you could actually put a work station here. This might even be your galley here, with the plumbing back to back, But you've got a little equipment to create an acoustical/physical barrier and your open area is here.

Archie: Um hum. What about sound separation right here? When someone gets up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and, bang, everyone else is woken up.

Desi: What's happening here is we're starting to see a separation of living and working as distinct ends. Potentially, quiet and noisy [areas].

Archie: We start to see some of the influences of the design. For one thing, separating those things allows you to get away from work. For, you know, you have different moods and different modes in which you behave. When you're in one side of the place your surroundings stimulate a certain kind of response, a certain kind of psychological response, whereas when you're on the other side, you're stimulated for another kind of response. . . . The danger of mixing them is that there is no place to get away, and every environment is stimulating multiple responses from you. So you don't have any support from your environment for your mood. It would seem to me that things like mood become pretty damn crucial when you're 45 days in a tin can with a bunch of people.

Experimenting with different arrangements—what Schön called making design “moves”—leads to a gradual differentiation of areas of the module. The designers make discoveries within the situation they have created. They discover that the constraints of the design situation (constraints that they have in a sense created by their concern with habitability and privacy issues) are leading to a “separation of living and working as distinct ends.” This begins to solve the problem of being cooped up together: there are qualitatively different kinds of areas where one can go to relax, socialize or work. In this way, they “start to see some of the influences of the design”: the constraints of the situation and the implications of their moves and concerns are starting to cause consequences that they notice. They start to discover in the sketch—as it evolves and as their interpretation or conceptualization of it evolves—that there are, “potentially, quiet and noisy” areas coming into definition. Now, a door can be closed to a crew compartment to provide a quiet area where someone can go to listen to music, tape-record one’s thoughts, or study a training manual.

They focus on the placement of the toilet, which had served to sharpen their concern about privacy. Previously, Desi had argued for a design where the toilet, the sink, and the shower were combined in one unit to save space. He had supported his suggestion by talking about the bathroom (“the head”) on a yacht, which squeezes all the functionality into a cramped space. He also recognized that combining the two in one room would cause accessibility problems, particularly first thing in the morning. Next, Archie brings in other concepts of bathroom design in which the shower or bath is located in a separate location. These different perspectives are introduced and kept in mind to determine alternative placements for toilet, sink, shower, and dressing area in the habitat, and to provide rationale for those alternatives. This allows the toilet and shower to be separated in Figure 3-3, removing the toilet from its acoustic and visual proximity to the sleeping and eating areas, while keeping the shower convenient to the sleep area.

Desi: Living/working; quiet/noisy. Now let's throw in that implication of some privacy when you go to the bathroom. If we're to say. . . .

Archie: Look, let's make the placement of the bathroom and shower a little more important. Or is the shower the same as the toilet and the sink? Could we separate them, have the shower a little more convenient to where you're going to change, get dressed. You get up in the morning, get dressed, change your clothes. Maybe that's a little more convenient.

Desi: You're not going to get up in the middle of the night and take a shower.

Archie: Here's an interesting analogy. America is, I think, the only one of the Western countries—I mean the countries of North America are the only ones—that have the toilet and the shower in the same room. Most of the European bathrooms have them in a separate room. Maybe that's changing as they're adopting some American style things over there. Certainly, in Germany it is no longer the case. But in England, I know, it's unusual to have the toilet and the shower in the same place. Americans use the term "bathroom" for the place where you go to the toilet. But the bathroom, if I'm not mistaken, in England means a separate room, which is connected. There is this separation. So maybe that becomes the model for what we should do. What that shows is there is a grouping of these activities which indicates sort of different levels of privacy.

Figure 3-3. A private dressing area.

Here, the designers have adopted a perspective on privacy. They are creating this new shared perspective by not only incorporating their personal, tacit definitions of privacy, but by merging in ideas from other perspectives. By deliberating issues among themselves from different perspectives, they begin to build an agreed upon framework for looking at their problem and proceeding with the design effort. The privacy perspective guides their moves and makes possible new discoveries that would not otherwise have occurred.

It is interesting to note that the design process at this point thrives on the consideration of alternatives. First, at the level of rearranging the layout, the alternatives are tried out in a rapid succession of sketches to get a feel for how they work. Secondly, though, the designing does not consist solely of sketching. Most of the time, in fact, is spent in discussing the alternatives from various perspectives. The issue of separation of toilet from shower, for instance, was considered from the perspective of yacht and submarine examples as well as from the traditional American and European house design perspectives. In trying to define the European tradition that he was referring to, Archie even indicated that the European perspective is multi-faceted and evolving, a mixture of, say, German, French, and English traditions changing under American influence. It is not as though there is one rule from some supposed “domain of bathroom design”—like: the toilet should be near the shower—or even that one such rule applies in the context of lunar habitat design. Rather, the designers deliberated a number of possible (and mutually conflicting) rules and tried them out. They continually switched perspectives to view their design differently and to discover new understandings of it through interpretation from these different perspectives and traditions of background knowledge.

The process can be put in Schön’s terms. Desi made a move (Figure 3-2). The designers reacted to the situation that they had created, and they discovered a serious problem (the adjacency of the toilet to the eating and sleeping areas), or “breakdown situation.” They began to reflect-in-action on the issue of the location of a toilet. As they came up with justifiable alternative responses to the issue, they tried them out in little sketches (or gestures indicating rearrangements of the sketched layout). They continued to come up with new conceptualizations until the problem was satisfactorily resolved. What may look like a lot of obvious verbiage in retrospect, was an engaged struggle with the problematic design situation during the “action moment.”

In Alexander’s terms, the designers are continuously trying to represent the structural patterns of the problem: should a decomposition of the habitat include the shower and toilet in a unit, or should the shower be with the sleep area and the toilet elsewhere? Archie’s last comment above suggests that the decomposition might be based on the European model he has presented, so that “there is a grouping of these activities [of daily life in the habitat] which indicates sort of different levels of privacy.” This leads to the layout in Figure 3-3, in which the activities of getting out of bed, showering, and dressing are grouped together, while the toilet, which might interfere with sleep or the use of the shower, is grouped elsewhere.

For Rittel, this is a good example of the need to deliberate issues from a variety of perspectives; there is no single best rule, but an open-ended variety of approaches that can be used to critique and refine each other. Archie’s lengthy discussions of people having different moods and different countries having different conceptions of bathrooms were not simply contributions of information, as though Desi did not already know these things. More importantly he was introducing new perspectives into the life of the debate and elaborating their rationale in an informal and abbreviated way. Deliberation is not simply a compiling of facts, but a subtle form of argumentation and persuasion through which a consensus might be reached and concepts of a shared language honed.

Schön, of course, adds the notion that the differing choices must then be tried out so their implications can be creatively-discovered. This takes place in the next two segments of the transcribed process, where the implications of Figure 3-3 are actively explored, leading to the design in Figure 3-4.

Desi: Oh yeah. So, what about the sleep compartments? As I said, chances are they are not going to get up in the middle of the night and take a shower. So we could probably safely put a shower next to a sleep compartment and create a zone where (this may be way out of scale) where you can have this privacy. Over here is the storage of clothes and stuff.

Archie: So that provides a buffer.

Desi: If you look at this elevation sketch, they all have their drawers along here for personal storage. You can get in to the drawers from this angle.

Archie: So you've actually got a sort of dressing, shower, change area as a buffer between that and the rest of the house. [See Figure 3-3.]

Desi: Right. The problem is if you want to change your clothes and take a shower, you're going to trap somebody back there and they can't get through. . . . What if you were to flip those? Say shower, storage here, and actually come in here and close this off. We've got this end-cone [of the tapered cylindrical module shell] geometry down here on the end which is a little awkward, where you could fit a lot of socks and underwear, as well as some plumbing. [See Figure 3-4.]

Figure 3-4. A privacy gradient.

Archie: So if you needed to take a shower or get to the storage you're going to have to walk through this sleep thing. Is there any danger. . . .

Desi: Well , you probably just shower once a day.

Archie: All right, the shower is probably not going to be a problem. But storage...

Desi: Storage? But this is clothes . . . personal effects. Stuff you need in the morning and at the end of the day, before you go to sleep and when you get up.

Archie: So if you forget something and you want to go back in you have to go past the sleeping people?

Desi: Yes, If they're sleeping. So anyway, the idea is that you could actually close this off and have a place to take a shower . . . come out here . . . change your clothes . . . and have relative privacy without obstructing circulation.

Archie: Then you do lose the buffer to the outside in the process. So there's a trade off. Also this storage thing here could conceivably be accessed from this direction, meaning that you wouldn't have to be in this area at all if you wanted to access it. The advantage there would be if you have some kind of tight corridor you wouldn't want to be pulling drawers out into it, but I suppose you could go inside. But I don't know how tight that is; a walk-in closet on the moon sounds like an extravagance.

Here Desi has grouped the shower together with the crew compartments because the preceding arguments suggested that the shower will not interfere with sleep the way an adjacent toilet might (and in fact did in Skylab). The shower forms a buffer between the sleep area and the rest of the module, which gives Desi the idea of creating a similar buffer on the other side of the corridor. He decides that can be a stowage (storage) compartment. To integrate it with the activities of getting up and showering, he says the astronauts will keep their clothes in drawers in the compartment. Archie sees that a buffer area has now been formed across the module. Adding doors to both ends of the buffer provides a changing room with access to the shower and the clothes storage. Desi likes the idea, but spots a traffic flow problem: when one person is changing, others cannot get out for their morning coffee. So he moves the changing area to the other end of the crew compartments, where it will not block traffic. (See Figure 3-4.) This move eliminates the buffer function, so Desi adds some small stowage areas to act as a wall and absorb sounds. He re-designs the shower and stowage to take advantage of odd-shaped spaces at the end, which had been wasted until now. Desi and Archie’s understanding of the habitat design evolves as they create new features (verbally or graphically), discover consequences, deliberate implications from different perspectives, and develop terms for interpreting the design situation.

Archie repeatedly tries to test this new arrangement by imagining astronauts going about various activities in the layout. This is an important process, that requires a strong imaginative sense of what it would be like to live and move in the real physical spaces that are represented in the sketches. This ability is founded on the designer’s understanding of what it is to be a person, to move about, to accomplish tasks, and to interact with objects, instruments, or other people. This ontological understanding allows people to adopt the interpretive perspectives of other people in other (even fictional) situations.

In addition, designers like Desi and Archie are constantly concerned with more quantitative issues, like 3-D volumes, adjacencies of different areas, and angles of access to spaces. To some extent these concerns relate to the human simulations: checking if a volume is adequate for pulling on clothes, if lights from one area will interfere with seeing things in another, or if opening doors will create safety hazards. In addition to spatial issues, designers must be concerned with lighting, noise, and dirt. In a lunar habitat, there will be no natural light and different areas will have to be illuminated differently depending upon their function. With a large number of mechanical and motorized systems at work in the metal module (circulating air, pumping water, etc.), noise and vibration are a serious problem. Lunar dust is very abrasive, so dust control systems are critical, especially when astronauts come in from working on the moon’s surface.

The more they think about the way the lunar habitat design is working out, the more Desi and Archie discover that many of the issues of privacy, light, dirt, and noise have worked themselves out to form a gradient in which these problems are closely correlated.

Desi: But you know what? What we've created here is a changing area, without affecting privacy. So just by shifting this you lose the buffer. Where this was leading is, I think, that this is the quiet end. I'm also thinking this might be the emergency exit, not the primary air lock. We still have quiet activities here. Down here is the privacy. Here's your toilet. And if you think about stuff that's noisy, the idea of being dirtier, dustier . . . [at the other end].

Archie: Are you talking about a kind of noise gradient? Along this thing, in other words, one end might be noisy and the other end might be quiet.

Desi: As far as the planning issues, if you want to create some rationale as to why you plan or zone certain activities or adjacencies the way you do, you look at noise levels; you look at . . .

Archie: . . . light . . .

Desi: . . . light level; you look at dirt; dirty versus clean and all those . . . .

Archie: Here's a basic point. One of the things you're short on in this place is distance. Okay? The one way, the one direction in which you have distance is along the axis . . . .

Desi: That's correct.

Archie: . . . of the things. Do you know Alexander's pattern of the long thin house? The idea is that to create privacy what you want to do is that you want to exploit distance, you want to make the house deliberately long and thin so people . . . . [Italics added.]

At this point a design has coalesced that has some satisfying coherence. It responds to the issues raised about privacy and arranges all the major necessary components of the habitat in a way which seems to make some sense. Of course, the design is far from final; in fact it will change considerably in future sessions, although some of its features will remain in place. So far, little thought has been given to determining sizes of things, and the drawings are not to scale. No storage space has been assigned for 45 days worth of food or other supplies. Space will obviously be extremely tight in the module—especially if so much room is permanently assigned to private sleep compartments—and too much space is wasted by the big corridor down the middle. There is very little space dedicated to the work of the mission, and not much thought given to room for exercise. But a start has been made.

This was a juncture of the designing process where there was a palpable sense of resolution for everyone. Major constraints imposed on the design—like the need for some privacy—and the secondary issues that arose in trying to solve them seemed fundamentally solved. The discovery of the privacy gradient concept (see italicized comments in transcript) resolved the prior discovery of the problem of privacy. It provided what designers call a parti, a guiding perspective for unifying a design. Now the designers felt that at last one had a place to go and relax in the habitat; this was finally becoming a home in which one could dwell, not merely function.

In a formal sense, the most satisfying aspect of the design is its consistent gradient character. This was an emergent property of the design process, with its concern for the creation of distinctly private and public areas. Desi observes that there is now a quiet end, which is also darker, cleaner, and quieter, in keeping with its private (and sleep oriented) character. The opposite end is where astronauts enter, bringing rock samples, equipment, and moon dust in with them. The noisy work takes place down there, with bright illumination for observing experiments. In the middle is a more moderate environment on each of the spectra, where the crew meets, prepares meals, eats, and socializes. This structure of the design gradually became explicit knowledge that could be shared in the transcribed dialog.

The privacy gradient that Desi and Archie came upon corresponds nicely with a chart in Volume I of NASA’s MSIS, the volume of general design considerations and requirements for all manned space missions. This chart of adjacency design considerations contains the only specific guidelines related to privacy in the volume. Privacy is defined in terms of audio and visual privacy: that someone is not seen or heard by others. In NASA’s terminology, “it has been found that a general sense of privacy increases when visual exposure of the individual is decreased and the individual has controllable visual access to the outside world” (NASA, 1989a, p.8-16).

Figure 3-5. Relative adjacencies based on functional relationships.

The chart (reproduced as Figure 3-5) was constructed by analyzing the relationships among 27 typical functions of a space module crew according to 5 criteria and displaying something like a statistical cluster analysis. The criteria are: frequency of switching from one function to another; extent to which one function leads to performing another; percentage of support equipment shared by the functions; potential for noise of one function to interfere with another; similarity of audio and visual privacy requirements. The functions are then plotted on two scales: public/private functions and group/individual functions. The recommendation to designers is to group functions in the module similarly to how they are grouped on the chart. Note that in the chart sleep, showering, and dressing are grouped in one quadrant (private, individual); meeting, eating, and food preparation are in another (public, group); while experimentation and payload support are in a third (public, individual). This corresponds closely to the three areas of the lunar habitat design: sleep and dressing area, galley/ward room/meeting area; and science/entry area.

Of course, the lunar habitat functional decomposition grew out of the designing process, not from use of the NASA chart. Rather, the design discoveries remind Archie of the discussion of techniques for achieving a privacy gradient in Alexander’s A Pattern Language. The principle of Pattern 109: Long Thin House there is, “The shape of a building has a great effect on the relative degrees of privacy and overcrowding in it, and this in turn has a critical effect on people’s comfort and well being” (Alexander, et al., 1977, p.535). Alexander recommends creating a shape in which the mean point-to-point distance is high: “string out the rooms one after another, so that distance between each room is as great as it can be” (ibid., p.537). In the lunar habitat, this has been accomplished by massing components along the walls to make the open space narrow and long.

Later, in Pattern 127: Intimacy Gradient, Alexander recommends, “Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence that begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains” (ibid., p.613). The lunar habitat has in effect adopted this pattern even though Alexander’s general pattern is primarily justified in terms of a spectrum of interpersonal relationships not relevant on the moon (strangers, friends, guests, clients, and family). The habitat grew into this pattern; there was never a conscious decision to make it conform to the pattern.

Suppose that Desi and Archie had first looked up the pattern and tried to decide if they should follow the rule of this pattern. How would they know if the rule was applicable? In the habitat, every crewmember has the same social relationships, so one might argue there should be no intimacy gradient. There is only a need for differentiation if one argues—as Archie in fact did when he introduced the need for privacy—that people have different moods and they want different relationships with the rest of the crew: sometimes buddies, sometimes co-workers, sometimes people to get away from. The question of applicability is a subtle one requiring complex human judgment. (The problem of applicability and its relation to interpretation will be discussed in Chapter 6.) How is a lunar habitat analogous to a home or office on the Earth? A traditional NASA engineering mentality would not make the analogy and would not see a problem with an undifferentiated, austere, work-oriented environment, as can be seen in the many factory-like designs for previous space missions.

The designs that Desi and Archie came up with at various stages contained striking parallels to many of Alexander’s patterns. The multi-purpose galley and ward room combination as social center corresponds closely to Pattern 129: Common Areas at the Heart, Pattern 139: Farmhouse Kitchen, and Pattern 147: Communal Eating. For a while, the habitat design gave each astronaut a combination of a sleep compartment connected to a desk/workstation and a stowage cabinet. This was very much in the spirit of Pattern 141: A Room of One’s Own. Later it was decided that this arrangement was too constraining on the arrangement of space, and the conceptual connections among the components was sacrificed.

Which of the patterns that Alexander culled from experiences on the Earth would make good rules of thumb for a domain of lunar habitat design? It seems impossible to simply list the applicable patterns. Rather, one might want to bring any of them into a particular deliberation when it seems appropriate, argue the pros and cons of applying it in the given design situation, perhaps try out some moves based on it, and see how things come out. Alexander’s patterns provide yet another perspective for the argumentation, even if they are already the result of deliberations over the years incorporating many other perspectives, and so are relatively refined and general. This suggests a more eclectic approach than one that assumes a set of rules representing some compilation of domain knowledge. Such an approach does not avoid the problems of knowledge representation; on the contrary, it makes it more important than ever to capture knowledge of multiple perspectives, and to continue collecting new knowledge indefinitely.

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