Disruptive Ideas for Outer Space Through Design. How Design Can Play a Strategic Role Beyond the Earth

The newly emerging discipline of space design is aimed both to enhance the research into well-being in outer space — increasing the comfort of the astronauts — and to generate innovation through the cross-fertilization between living in space and living on earth — intersecting different areas of knowledge and fields of applications that can be taken from space and translated to earth, and vice-versa, in space jargon, spin-offs and spin-ins. Space is a very stimulating world to explore for a designer who wants to deal with the new, the unknown, and who can imagine more suitable environments, extra-terrestrial habitats, and objects, which do not belong to our daily life experience on earth, but which could be very suitable, useful, and also beautiful, for a new generation of people who will inhabit and perform them. This paper presents the disruptive role of sensory design for space through a case study that acts as a bridge between science, technology and beauty thanks to the capacity to predict new behaviours, gestures and scenarios in conditions never experienced before by the human being.