Episode 13: Design and Music in Space with Sands Fish
Join Emily and Alexa as they chat with experience designer Sands Fish about designing for life in outer space, inventing a musical instrument specifically for zero-G environments, and his work with MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative.
Show Notes
Sands Fish:
Substack: offworlddesign.substack.com
On Nicole Stott painting in space, in conversation with Dr. Sian Proctor: Youtube
Capillary Cup (coffee cup for use in zero-g)
Stefana Fratila (artist, composer, and sound designer working with sound filters)
Text References
NASA STI Repository (also known as the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS))
Emily references Placing Outer Space by Lisa Messeri and When the Machine Made Art by Grant Taylor.
Transcript
[Intro Music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]
Alexa
Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I’m Alexa Erdogan.
Emily
And I’m Emily Olsen.
Alexa
And our guest today is Sands Fish, who will talk to us about designing for life in outer space!
[interlude: “Space” by Music Unlimited]
Emily
Sands Fish is an artist, designer, and technologist passionate about crafting human experiences. Working across the fields of graphic, industrial, and interaction design, he creates human-centered works that prioritize agency, exploration, and creativity. As a founding member of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, Fish collaborated with astronauts to identify opportunities for agency and creativity in zero-gravity. He has taught at MIT, Northeastern University, and Parsons School for Design. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington.
Alexa
Awesome! Welcome to the show, Sands. Thank you so much for your time and for being with us here today.
Sands
Thank you so much for having me.
Alexa
So yeah, Emily and I were looking at your bio before and we know that you've done work as an experience designer. So Emily, would you like to start us off?
Emily
Sure, absolutely. What does it mean to be an experience designer? What does that entail?
Sands
Yeah, I can give you my own perspective. I think probably there are a lot of definitions floating around out there. I think it means designing from the perspective of the human that's going to experience a particular design.
So you might say, “Well, doesn't that make everybody an experience designer?” And I think that's true to some degree.
You design a dinner or you might design a party or a date. You might light some candles or put on some music. And I think the key is that you're being intentional about those things.
Say you're going to go on a road trip with your friend and you leave your car a complete disaster beforehand. You haven't designed an experience. [laugh] You've neglected to create the conditions for a good experience. So I think there's a fine line there. But yeah, I think intentionality is the key. I think it's frequently a synthesis role.
So you have to think about a lot of different things, a lot of different aspects of an experience.
So user experience design is one corner of this. Of course, we've all had an experience where we've used an app that was useful to us, but we had to fight against it because it just wasn't designed with certain things in mind. And we have to contort ourselves to fit that.
But I think a little bit more in the physical and emotional realm. What is this experience that we're going to lead somebody through and how can we scaffold it so that it's the best experience possible?
Emily
That's a really helpful explanation. Thank you so much. I've worked with, like, design objects before, but in terms of experiential design, that's really new to me. And it's so cool that it has such a broadly applicable definition when so much of what you've worked on has been designing for space.
Sands
Yeah, experience design has to take a lot of things into account when thinking about space travel and space exploration. I almost want to say there's an infinite amount of details that you need to take into account. Certainly, safety is primary. It has to be.
And I think that's what the history of space exploration has been. It's been very focused on because it's a nearly impossible thing. Making sure that all of the checklists are perfect, that everybody knows exactly what to do, that there's a lot of training. And so to some degree, we rely on the people that we select for that role and their training and what they're good at, what they're good at putting up with. But I think we're arriving at a point where there's going to be more opportunities to think about that experience. Safety isn't necessarily solved, but it is certainly becoming a more reliable endeavor. And so that lets us start to think about how we can improve the rest of the experience.
Alexa
That's such an interesting point that you make. I hadn't thought about it when you were talking about how we rely on the people that are chosen to go to these space missions. When you talk about user experience, in my head, because I'm thinking very much like you're mentioning apps, front end, like user design, you design things for a generic user. But it's interesting, you have to, I guess, also take into account specific personality traits or like risk postures for the specific kinds of people who are going to be going to these space missions.
Sands
Yeah, it's almost like getting to choose your user base to a certain degree, which, as you can imagine, changes the way that you approach design.
Alexa
Mhm. So some of the work that you've done has been at the MIT Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, which is such a cool title or program that I hadn't thought of or heard of before. What was it in your journey throughout your career that led you towards that initiative, and what is it like to be a part of that program?
Sands
Yeah, I had always been fascinated with space since I was a kid, like so many of us. And I was a member of the Planetary Society and got the little magazine in the mail. And I was always fascinated by the endeavor and by the visuals and the stories. But I never thought that I'd be able to contribute to that. It seemed like something that was reserved for people who were really, really strong in physics and math. And you know, I have a computer science background. And so that path didn't feel like it was going to take me to space exploration necessarily.
But at some point, I started not getting bored with computer science, but I think that I wanted to think more about how technology has an impact in people's lives. And that's how I found my way into design and how that is really about crafting technology to improve people's lives. And so that took me down a path of thinking about humans and centering the human in designs. And so I found myself into the human-centered design space, which is how I ended up at the MIT Media Lab.
A lot of people there are thinking deeply about the impact that new technologies are going to have on society, on the individual. So I felt very at home there. And right as I was about to finish my graduate work there, somebody sent an e-mail out saying that there was a thing called the Space Exploration Initiative now, and that the first thing that they were going to do is have an open call for a zero-g flight, which for those who are not familiar, is a flight where they fly the plane in this kind of dramatic parabola. And right at the top of that parabola, you get about 15 to 20 seconds of weightlessness. And we can get into the details of what weightlessness is versus really being in zero-g…
But they put out this open call and it seemed like a dream come true. And I immediately went to work thinking of what it could be that I could propose. And I'd always wanted to work with my friend Nicole L'Huillier, who is in a group called Opera of the Future.
She's focused on the future of music. And we were both musicians and had always wanted to work together. And so we decided to try and think of some proposal related to music that we could do for this flight. And we sat down and we watched a lot of videos of astronauts giving tours of the ISS just to try and get a sense of what life is like in that environment.
And every once in a while, we'd see something float by behind them that just seemed to have its own agency and a poetic motion that we had never really seen before.
So we were really captured by that. And we said that, that's it. Whatever that motion is, whatever we feel when we see that, that's what we want to make music from. So yeah, that was the beginning of my time at the Space Exploration Initiative. And that took us down a path of creating a number of other experiments for zero-g flights and a lot of magic.
Emily
I know that that was the period where you created the telemetron, which I'm super excited to talk about. But before you mentioned more generally designing for space, can you talk a little bit about the differences in designing for space versus designing for life on Earth, such as in zero gravity environments or the ISS spaces being different or potentially more restrictive than someone might experience on Earth?
Sands
Yeah, absolutely. I think that first zero-g flight that I took cracked my brain open to all of the possibilities for design in an environment like that.
I'd been thinking about terrestrial design a lot leading up to that. So I had a lot floating around in my head about what design meant and what its constraints were and what its opportunities were.
But when I experienced weightlessness for the first time, it just unlocked something for me that every time I looked at an object after that flight, I'd be kind of assessing in this kind of foreign way. So I think, yeah, that experience kind of helped me to rediscover gravity. It's kind of like this invisible ingredient in everything that we create.
So if you think about a coffee cup, for instance, which there are coffee cups designed specifically for zero-g. And so when I would look at a terrestrial coffee cup, I just start to notice it has a flat bottom. Why does it have a flat bottom? Because it needs to stay in place on a surface. And why is it staying in place on a surface? Because there's constant force pressing down on it, keeping it there. But of course, that's invisible to us and we just take it for granted.
And so as I started looking around at different objects, started immediately trying to imagine what they would be like in zero-g. This comes up in a lot of workshops that I do. In one of the workshops, we talked about what people would want to bring to space with them.
One of the participants said that they wanted to bring their cat, that they would never want to go to space without their cat. And so we thought about what the litter box would look like in space.
And as you can imagine: if everything floats, things get complicated very quickly. So I think there's a lot of surprising considerations and ways in which things transform for that environment.
I guess the other thing to think about is that you largely have to imagine it when you're doing your design exercises. You can't really go there. But of course, the next best thing is to talk to people who have been there. And so I've had the privilege to interview a number of astronauts as a way to understand where the opportunities are for designing in space.
And they have a lot of intuition. I think being in zero-g gives you, like, an embodied knowledge that is hard to get otherwise.
And so when you're designing for space, you really need to rethink a lot of your assumptions. So there are a number of different gravities. So I'm going to default to talking about zero-g because I think it's interesting because it's the most extreme version: the absence of gravity. We can talk about the moon and how it has one-sixth gravity and Mars has different gravity.
All of those considerations change how you would design for those environments. But in zero-g, the walls can become the floors, can become the ceiling. So you have almost like a 360 degree consideration suddenly, whereas you might have only been thinking in 2D before.
Alexa
Does that sort of expansion of possibilities for interfaces… does it become restrictive at all, because now there's so much more that you have to think of, or is it more like helping to expand the imagination when it comes to designing experiences?
Sands
I think it's a bit of both. I think the safety concerns alone are inherently restrictive, and for good reason. But at the same time, the absence of gravity opens up a lot of opportunities that we might not have considered before. So it's an interesting tension because you have this environment where it's very important that particles of food or screws aren't floating around because that becomes an inhalation hazard.
Or for instance, there's a story that I believe is true that they lost an iPad on the ISS for like 2 months. And one day it just kind of floated out and down the hallway. And it was because you certainly can't put things in one place and expect them to be there. So there's a lot of discussion we can have about Velcro and the ways that you adapt to this constraint or freedom. But the iPad floated behind a cabinet somewhere and just found its way there and then was just agitated out of that position by something. So there are both constraints and opportunities there.
Emily
That's fascinating. I hadn't heard of the iPad incident. I'd heard of the tomato that they were doing experiments on the tomato and they'd misplaced a tomato and there was a very limited pool of suspects as to what could have happened to it.
[laughter]
And then they found it months later.
Sands
Yeah, it's that every day, almost mundane set of strange happenings that makes it so magic for me.
Emily
Absolutely. And also, thinking of operating in space, and you've touched on before: your musical background and your project in the open call… I'm so excited for you to tell us about the Telemetron, or designing for a musical experience in space.
Sands
Yeah, honestly, it's one of my favorite projects that I've ever worked on. And it was done, like I said earlier, in collaboration with Nicole L'Huillier. We saw that poetic motion that an object could have in zero-G. And we tried to think about how we could embody that in an instrument somehow. We wanted to capture that motion and we also wanted to rethink the musical instrument because there are a lot of conventions, of course, and we get a lot of questions about whether normal instruments would work the same in space.
And generally the answer is yes, inside of an architecture. So that goes for guitar strings, which are going to vibrate roughly the same. But it doesn't go for things like pianos. So pianos have counterweights that guarantee that the key will return to its original position.
But of course, counterweights don't work in zero-g. So there are a lot of different considerations.
And again, gravity becomes this ingredient that you never really thought was part of the design in the first place. So we wanted to try and throw out a lot of our conventions for musical instruments. So when we started designing it, we designed it with motion in mind.
We thought about wind chimes and there have been some wind chimes somebody designed to take up to the ISS. And so that's certainly a kind of a precursor to our work. What we wanted to do was create something that used that motion and really conveyed a sense of the environment in the music that it created.
So what we did was create a chamber and it had a number of elements inside it that we called chimes. They were really electronics that were measuring the different rotations of those chimes. So you can imagine rotation happening in X, Y, and Z.
And so those chimes are just constantly, I'll say, singing out their X, Y, and Z coordinates to a nearby computer, which synthesized them into musical notes. And where it gets really fun is once you've got the motion and you map that to different types of sounds, you can be really creative in the ways in which those motions impact the sound.
And again, you get into questions of whether or not you want to rely on musical conventions or really get crazy. [chuckles] I think I chose a little bit of the latter in some of those.
Emily
And did you test this in the parabolic flights before? Or…how did you build this on Earth for a zero-g environment?
Sands
Yeah, it goes back to having to imagine how things are going to behave, right? So we would have to do tricks, like obviously we could rotate the chimes around to test if they were working, but I would put them on the end of strings and try and whip them around and not hit the ceiling and try and get a sense of how different types of motions would impact the music.
And so in some ways we were trying to craft the sounds of the instrument based on what we could replicate under one-g. And that alone was pretty fun and fascinating. Having a musical instrument that responds to movement is fascinating.
I think that it got much more interesting when we got up in the zero-g flights because it was the first time that we were ever able to see what it was going to behave like. And Nicole likes to talk about it as a dance between a human and a non-human. And there is a body language that is new in zero-g as well. You're subject to the same physics suddenly as this other object. And so it is a bit of a dance.
And that body language is something that we could only really start to develop once we were on the zero-g flight. And so playing around with spinning it and letting it go and letting it just rotate in front of us was fairly magical and something that we couldn't have done under one-g. And moving your body while holding the instrument and kind of contorting yourself in order to perform it was fascinating. And so there was a lot that was revealed about the instrument once we were able to play it in zero-g.
Alexa
As you're talking about the design process for it, it sounds like you had to sort of unlearn a lot of assumptions or like deconstruct how a lot of these instruments are physically producing sound and helping produce music with human interaction.
After creating the telemetron and flying it, has that design experience and the experience of playing it in orbit, has that given you any sort of new perspective? Has that made you rethink how you make music now as a musician on Earth? Has it inspired you in any new ways or like shifted your perspective at all?
Sands
So I was showing the Telemetron at the Dubai Design Week at one point and a large part of the population was kids being brought in from school to see all of these amazing designs that people had created. And one girl hung behind the rest of her group and came up to me and said, “Have you ever thought of what sheet music would look like for a musical instrument like this?” And my jaw dropped and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. This 8-year-old girl thought about an aspect of an instrument that I had created in a completely different way. So it really has had an impact on how I think about terrestrial music and the constraints that gravity places on it, but also the opportunities.
I've worked on some similar instruments since that allow you to use your body motion in order to impact the sound of a synthesizer or a guitar or what have you. And so there are definitely things that I brought back from that experience that have impacted how I think about music.
Emily
As you were explaining how it worked in space, I was also wondering how you were composing music for this instrument, or if that was wound up in the process of experimenting with it in different settings.
Sands
Yeah, we largely didn't try to compose anything beforehand because we didn't want to constrain things ahead of time. It was a real gift to be able to experiment and let the instrument kind of tell us how it was supposed to be played in a way.
Alexa
Talking more about some of your other projects, could you tell us a little bit more about the astronaut ethnography project and how that came about, how it evolved over time, what it really entails, all that jazz.
Sands
Yeah. I mentioned earlier that we have a hard time designing for space because we can't just hop on a plane and go there. And so one of the next best things is to talk to people who have a deep and embodied experience of that place. And that was a lot of what my graduate work was related to, was doing design research to understand communities that have unique needs. And so we started to think about how we might interview astronauts to understand these environments better. And what we decided was that the population of people who have lived on the ISS for any amount of time would be an ideal population because while there's a lot of super fascinating stories from the Shuttle and other space stations, (relatively speaking [chuckles]) there have been a lot of people who have lived on the ISS.
And so we started reaching out to our friends in the community. And Cady Coleman, the astronaut, was somebody who was a friend of the Space Exploration Initiative. So she was the first astronaut that we were able to sit down with and actually ask all of our most fascinated questions about this environment. And it's funny because you can study this stuff, but really never have a deep sense of what the experience is like.
And so we started asking a lot of questions like, “What did you do on your time off?” And “what things happened to you that you didn't expect when you trained to be an astronaut?” Another question we asked was, “Did the station feel like home to you?” And so when you're thinking in this mindset of an experience designer, you really want to know and have a rich sense of what that experience has been like for them.
And there are a lot of stories, of course. A lot of them are very human, I think. You have a very small group of people that you have to be in close quarters with, and that has strains, of course, but also forms really strong bonds. You have to rely on each other. So there were a lot of things that we learned about the interpersonal life in space. Some of them were just practical. Like if the toilet breaks, it's really embarrassing to have to ask your friend to come over and help you fix it. I won't paint any more of a picture of that, [laughter] but the degree to which you begin to rely on your fellow astronauts is much more significant than I think I had realized before.
So we began to speak to other astronauts that Cady was able to connect us to. And of course, there were a lot of different experiences that individual astronauts had. And what we started to learn was that there were things about the nature of the way the ISS was designed that were not perfectly conducive to a comfortable living space, probably unsurprising.
A lot of them talked about how it was like camping in the office or how there are no seasons in the ISS. The temperature is always at exactly the same temperature, give or take a little bit. And it's very much like a lab environment.
And so a lot of equipment, a lot of stark white walls, probably not enough windows. And so we started to learn about all of these different kind of qualitative experiential aspects of life on station that had a really big impact on the way people behaved. And one of the things that I'm the most fascinated about is how design choices translate into how people behave.
So for instance, they wanted a sensory refresh. If you're always hearing the same constant hum from the life support systems, and there's a lot of white noise, and it's always the same temperature, you start craving this kind of sensory refresh. And so they would go to places in the station where there was carpeting from a really early module, and they would really appreciate that tactile experience.
And there was also one of the modules that was painted salmon pink, which I think a lot of people questioned when that was being done on the ground. But because it was such a unique and interesting and stimulating color, it ended up drawing people there. It was like a unique sensory refresh for them. That was also one of the places where there's a table. And so the design of some of these mundane objects really helped to craft the experience and the social experience.
And so it became a gathering place more than a lot of things. And I always think back to a story about when the first mission went to the ISS and the first thing that they needed to do was sit down and do some work, do some paperwork. And they realized that nobody had included a table. [laughs] That just wasn't part of it. And for a project that's so gargantuan and seemingly impossible with so many different considerations, you can understand how that might fall down on the list of priorities.
But what he did was go and find some spare parts and build himself a table. And I love how that was one of the first things that was crafted up there, that you can be creative and resourceful in this environment, even when everything is so rigidly defined.
Emily
In our previous episode with Justin Walsh, who’s an archaeologist who studies space archaeology, he mentioned the table specifically when we were talking about what we wish we could conserve after we lose the ISS, because of how significant it was from a social and also just a habitat aspect of something that was needed and built entirely in space.
Sands
Yeah, I think that particular table, the makeshift one that they made originally, is now in the Smithsonian. But of course, there have been a number of tables and other social objects that have taken hold up there. So I do hope that they save as much as possible.
Alexa
Yeah, after all of your interview experiences with these different astronauts… I'm sure like with each interview, it paints a new picture of what life is like up there from the people that are actually living it versus what it was intended to feel like.
How did those interviews sort of evolve your creative understanding of the space from both like a human perspective and also from a design perspective? What are some additional things that these interviews revealed as the project sort of continued over time?
Sands
Yeah, some of the things that were described to me gave me a better insight for the physical environment. And I feel like we typically think of nature as kind of ending at the atmosphere almost, as if it's purely an earthbound thing.
But there are physical experiences in zero-g that you can't have on Earth because the one G of gravity is kind of blunting a lot of these smaller forces. And so when that's removed, you get all of these other different phenomena that start to appear.
Nicole Stott is one of the astronauts that had a creative life on the station. And she described the first time that she tried to watercolor paint in zero-g. And there are a lot of accounts of this out there, but the part that really got me was she said that she dipped her brush in water and she went to paint on the canvas. But before her brush even got to the canvas, the water started reaching out for the paper. And that gave me chills, just that there are these phenomena that are heavily implicated in creativity that we just can't have here. And the fact that there's a whole world of creative experiences to be had off-world is endlessly exciting to me.
Emily
Absolutely. I know that there's a couple of videos on YouTube of Nicole painting in space with the watercolor that I'll be sure we include in our show notes. And also, we were so keyed in to your conversation about the Telemetron, we will absolutely be including YouTube links for our transcript as well. So everything we've been talking about will be in the show notes.
Sands
Excellent.
Alexa
Could you also talk a little bit more about how you have utilized data analysis to combine space and art in some of your projects? I'm thinking initially of your Ghost Planets piece that was featured in the 2014 gallery show of MIT's Art of Astrophysics competition, for example.
Sands
Yeah, that was one of those projects that I needed to be a side project because everything else I was doing there was so heavy [laugh] that side projects tend to save you sometimes. I was, of course, taken with the fact that there was even an art and astrophysics show and really wanted to participate in that. It's just a great creative prompt.
And so I just walked into the MIT Astrophysics Department, just kind of cold called them, showed up and started asking around to see if anybody had any data. I was doing a lot of data visualization at the time. And I was just curious to see what kind of data is out there about astrophysics. I know that there's a lot. I know that we do a lot of experiments and create a lot of spacecraft to gather that. So they told me about how we find exoplanets.
And typically, how you do that is a star is too bright, that it kind of makes it impossible to see the planets circling around it. But what you can do is see how the star wobbles back and forth because the planets are tugging on that star and it gets tugged back and forth. We can at least see it in kind of a single dimension moving left to right.
And so that's how we try and find hints of planets around other stars. And what he gave me was the formula for our own star. So if an alien was trying to find planets around our star, it would see this kind of tug back and forth, and it would see how as the planets align and misaligned, that it has this pattern that plays out.
And so he was generous enough to give me that, and I was able to run that formula over 1000 years just to see exactly how our star would wobble back and forth. And I plotted that sway back and forth on kind of an X&Y axis with the Y axis pointing down and representing time. So it was an exercise in mark making, really, just with a lot of steps in between.
So that was done with the Processing language, which is a programming language for artists. I think it's fascinating to try and reveal what's hidden in these data sets. And I don't think this was ever, you know, a way that they thought that this would be used, but I think that's some of the power of the creative arts interacting with science is that you can reveal these patterns in surprising ways that might not have ever been pursued as a scientific pursuit.
So there are ways of engaging with these scientific products that can be very creative and also very revealing.
Alexa
Yeah, that's such a great point. It's something that I feel like we keep coming back to in several episodes: just how interdisciplinary space really can be and all the fields that interact with it, especially the creative arts, just continue to unravel so many layers to it that you wouldn't see if you just had one specific perspective.
Sands
Yeah, there's a lot of great work going on out there that really does add additional perspectives to how we think about space exploration. Jennifer Roberts at Harvard is doing some amazing work using the humanities to engage in space exploration that historically hasn't been a focus of the humanities, but there is so much to learn about humans and how both human behavior and how human culture evolves in the context of space exploration.
There's also somebody I met who was doing an audio filter that helped you to hear what sounds would sound like on the different planets in the solar system. So again, there are just a lot of wonderful experiments happening that address the environment of space just from ways that you would never really think of.
Emily
I was just thinking also in terms of the intersections of science and technology and art, when you were mentioning plotting the data sets, I just recently read When the Machine Made Art by Grant Taylor about the birth of computer art and how it was physically plotting in the programming language.
And it's so cool to see just the extension of that today using these data sets in such creative ways to just shine a light on more ways that data can be not only just interpreted, but presented and understood in different contexts is so fascinating to me.
Sands
Yeah, and I think there’s quantitative data, which has its own interesting ways of being engaged with and I think while qualitative data is really where my passion lies, both valuable obviously. But in science and engineering, we rely heavily on the quantitative, but sometimes qualitative data is just as important. The interviews that we were doing and learning things that just weren't part of the typical engineering process was what made it so fascinating.
Emily
Another touch point this was reminding me of is Lisa Messeri's book, Placing Outer Space, and the different ways in which scientists are studying exoplanets and helping audiences understand and imagine what these different exoplanets are like while they're studying them. I'll also link in the show notes.
Do you have any advice or references for people interested in learning more about design for space?
Sands
Yeah, absolutely. One of the nice things about space exploration is that there's a lot written about it, both technical and philosophical and design as well. One paper that really inspired me early on was called “The Aesthetics of Verticality, A Gravitational Contribution to Aesthetic Preference,” which is a mouthful, so I will explain it simply. Essentially, they did experiments where they were trying to figure out if gravity had an impact on people's preferences.
They had a number of paintings that they had people look at and rate their opinion of. And some of those people, they leaned off of the gravitational vertical and had people look at them a bit sideways. And of course, some people in line with the gravitational vertical that we all share, just straight up and down, the frame of perception that you, by default, view everything in. And what they showed was that there is a statistically significant difference between what you believe is beautiful or aesthetically pleasing if you're standing straight up and down versus off at an angle.
And of course, when you're in zero-g, you frequently are viewing things from dramatically different angles. Even talking to people, I think it's challenging if you are drifting so that you're almost facing upside down. This is an easy experiment to try at home, try and have a conversation with, especially an emotional conversation [laughter] with somebody when you can't quite read their facial expressions in the way that you normally would.
So, that paper is endlessly fascinating to me because it really - it hints at something fairly profound that gravity, which again is this invisible ingredient, seems to be impacting things that we would just take for granted as unchangeable.
I would say if you're interested in this type of work, I would read books like Spacesuit: [Fashioning Apollo] by Nicholas de Monchaux, which catalogs the creation of the soft space suits that Apollo used by breaking them down into all of the layers of material that were used to make them. That is a fantastic book.
There's Space Settlements by Fred Scharmen that talks about a lot of the history and implications of how space settlements have evolved over time. And then Janet Vertesi's Seeing Like a Rover is a fantastic book that talks a lot about how all of the people who are responsible for driving the rover begin to identify with it in some way. It's almost like this huge group of people all start channeling their identity into this one rover, and that's very powerful. So Janet Vertesi's book is incredible.
And just maybe a final recommendation, NASA's NTRS server is publicly accessible and is full of incredible papers, very technical papers frequently, but it's a treasure trove of the deep, deep work that people are doing to solve all manner of problems in space flight. So I would definitely recommend poking around in there.
Alexa
Yeah, I think, Emily, you had mentioned Fred Scharman's book before -
Emily
Yes!
Alexa
…as well, right, when we were chatting?
Emily
Yes. Space Settlements, I had been really excited when I worked at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. His book was one of the books that we had. And it's just a really, really great book. I'm so excited to check out all of the other books that you've mentioned.
Alexa
So if folks wanted to learn more about your work and more about you and the kind of stuff that you do, where might folks be able to find you online?
Sands
Yeah, you can go to my website at sandsfish.com. I also have sands.fish, which I'm very proud of. And you can go to my Substack. It's offworlddesign.substack.com. And I write there about all of the ways that human culture and design is evolving in the space exploration context.
Alexa
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Sands. This has been wonderful.
Sands
It's been a delight. Thank you.
Emily
Thank you. It's been so, so cool.
[interlude music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]
Alexa
Thanks for listening to today’s episode. As a reminder, all episode transcripts are available on our website, artastra.space. Shownotes, including text references such as the scholars that Sands cited, are available on there as well.
Emily
As ever, if you enjoyed listening to the show, please give a rating and consider leaving a review on whatever platform you listened! This helps others find our podcast and spreads the word! You can also follow us on social media @artastrapodcast.
[outro music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]