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Illustration for the thesis cover by author.
Life on Mars?
Speculative approach on material exploration in the context of Mars habitation.
Life on Mars?
Speculative approach on material exploration in the context of Mars habitation.
Aalto University, Espoo, Dec. 2021
Thesis project
This project was my thesis subject. I decided to select this subject to demonstrate how design can be used in the context of emerging materials. As well as space missions are becoming more relevant the design should also be there where interaction between humans and new environment is happening.
Design is also there to ask questions and reflect different scenarios about the future. It is also about co-designing between different disciplines and encouraging to explore and experiment with emerging materials and technologies.
Introduction
Introduction
Population growth and lack of resources are today's challenges that drive us to find better solutions for saving our tomorrow. We have understood that the materials of today and the future need to be produced more efficiently and save our scarce resources on our planet and protect what we already have. This transformation creates new demand for material sources, material production and material use. Therefore, it is necessary to collaborate between different fields. We are learning to work in a multidisciplinary way as the problems are more complex and require many different professional perspectives. For example, designers are learning from biologists and chemists and vice versa. Therefore, multidisciplinary communication is now more critical than ever before.
An artifact made from Martian regolith simulant, mycelium and straw.
Hands-on material exploration
Hands-on material exploration
Hands-on material experimenting is probably the most used method in design. It is important to understand the material properties and behaviour. Without this tactile process, it would be extremely difficult to explore all the possible usages and create more in-depth scenarios. Also, the hands-on exploring process is more about learning through failures that happen during the process as the materials did not react as planned.
Oyster mushroom mycelium growth on a petridish.
Martian regolith simulant from Martian Garden.
Model of the mycelium composite.
Model of the mycelium growing on a MSS-1 tile.
Model of the combination where mycelium composite and mycelium on the MSS-1 tile are grown together.
Scenario building
Scenario building
The thesis was also covering the application of the materials and scenario building was a tool to discover the future use cases. Scenarios help us to understand the environment or use cases of the design that is built for. Scenario building has several tools to explain the concept: stories, illustrations, storyboards, personas. The information for scenario building can be found from future forecasting, megatrends and new technologies.
Voroscope by Joseph Voros. (2015). Adapted from "On examining Preposterous! futures" (2015) https://thevoroscope.com/2015/12/28/on-examining-preposterous-futures/
THE VOROSCOPE
Voroscope is a diagram in 3d space, there is the present time in the centre, and from present time, it expands to future and past, the most central of the horizontal line is the most probable future, when moving away from the horizontal centre, the more impossible the events become.
FUTURE FORECASTING
How can we predict the imaginary future? Some tools provide us guidelines for predicting our future path; we can use tools from storytelling and create scenarios with our main characters and main events in specific scenery. Mixing different tools and sources, using mega-trends, weak signals, will already give us a good start to create plausible forecasting. With this forecasting, we can then create scenarios to visualize the plausibility.
WRITTEN FUTURE SCENARIOS
WRITTEN FUTURE SCENARIOS
By combining the tools explained above, different future scenarios were created and which you can read more by clicking the images shown below.
ARRIVAL
RESOURCES
INFRASTRUCTURE
ADAPTING
COMMUNICATION
Mycelium searching for food on the surface of a tile made from Martian regolith simulant.
Outcomes
Outcomes
In the context of Mars, the hands-on process showed that the use of fungi could be viable building material in Martian habitats. The Pleurotus Ostreatus mycelium is capable of growing on the martian soil simulant, together with nutrients. It is possible to make ceramic tiles from martian soil simulant and inject the nutrient on the tile and mycelium is probably capable of living on the tile. By combining these two methods above the mycelium can be grown on a MMS-1 tiles using nutrients as a ‘glue’. In addition, the mycelium growing can be performed in relatively simple conditions. Therefore, the possibilities of mycelium use as a circular biocomposite are well justified.
The more we learn from fungi properties the wilder scenarios we can create. Anyhow, the speculations did not only introduce the possible scenarios of how we could live on another planet but also raised questions; should we go to another planet and who will decide how we live there and what species we are taking with us? There are social and ethical aspects to be considered in these scenarios and it would be interesting to hear what thoughts these speculations evoke.
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