Susan Marie Fairburn

Rethinking Water: A CAAS (City As A Spaceship) design approach

Abstract Water is ubiquitous and essential, yet we struggle to understand it from a systems perspective. Water is a terrestrial closed-loop system involving individuals, communities, cities and geographies, and as such, might it serve as a metaphor for sustainable design? We identify four locations and frame their connections through water and society. This interaction is highly relevant to future dense urban environments and of interest to CAAS (City As A Spaceship) who explore reciprocities between terrestrial and extra-terrestrial architecture and design. CAAS explores these approaches to water management: 1) California State (United States) 2) New Delhi (India) 3) The International Space Station (Lower Earth Orbit) 4) Micro-Ecological Life-Support System Alternative (European Space Agency Research settings) In this paper, CAAS applies design research approaches to curate and frame reciprocities between situations and societies. Using locational case studies and city-by-city scale infographics it generates a discursive space from which to imagine conceptual shifts in sustainable design.

Spheres of Practice for the Co-design of Wearables

Abstract As expectations within the area of smart textiles increasingly become informed and driven by technological developments, the disciplinary boundaries and relationship between user and technological innovation will unavoidably transform. The authors venture that new paradigms of collaborative practice will inevitably develop between design and science, to more fully realize both the opportunities and contexts that wearable textiles offer. Drawing on previous work by the authors namely Molecular Imprinted Textiles (MIT – 2009/10), Future Textile Visions (FTV – 2010/11), Design Specks: Connecting People with Speckled Computing (2012/13), Second Skin (2013/14), and The S*** Word: Designing the Empathic Underwardrobe (2014), a model is proposed to more clearly understand and navigate between design, technology and application, and more importantly, between our cultural understanding of the user and the wearer. This paper reflects on a series of projects that inform a methodological approach: a process of asking questions; developing scenarios; exploring materials and making; generating concepts and building prototypes. Each project involved collaborations between design, academics, users and industry, and a form of co-design, where knowledge exchange was central, design was the intermediary, and the goal was to understand the drivers and the stakeholders. Simultaneously, this research sought to better understand and communicate the development of more empathic textile and fashion artifacts, and solutions. Co-design in this context is seen as a core approach to shifting the balance from technology as merely adjunct, or as a “hook” for marketers and users, to a more informed and harmonised position, where technology sits proximally and comfortably. The notion of interdisciplinary understanding, which tracks across domains of product, fashion and textiles, presents an approach where the application is still emerging. Through analysis of this progressive series of projects, the authors suggest that there is an opportunity to explore the inherent connectedness that textiles might offer for the integration and embedding of technology within material as a means to embrace these affordance opportunities. Central to this notion is the realisation of opportunities arising from dialogue and collaborative making (i.e. co-design), and for exploring the transformative notions of the user and the wearer. This paper led the authors to pose a set of questions that align to a four stage design process: Research, Define, Develop, Reflect, to frame findings and insights, and to outline the potential for future opportunities of working with technology to achieve the making and wearing of desirable materializations on the body.

Space4Inspiration: survival lab: designing countermeasures for natural disasters.

Abstract The advances made for spaceflight have influenced almost every aspect of modern life on Earth through spin-off technologies. Looking at the Space environmental context and the crew dynamics we can gain insights and inspiration into how to manage stressful and unpredictable emergency situations. In this paper we enquire into ways that design can help generate countermeasures to enhance our resilience to terrestrial extremes and generate solutions for sustained survival to natural disasters. The extraordinary dynamics in urban populations means that growing numbers of people find themselves in an extreme environmental situation – floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, fire or hurricane. Design for Space and extreme environments provide the transformative lens for applying lessons learned from one extreme scenario to another. What if the design of an emergency habitation module could be transformed into a Survival Lab: a mobile training centre able to recreate analogue conditions determined in natural disasters and prepare people to respond actively?