Designing for 3-Dimensional Space
“In the same space you can see many different interiors, depending on the position of your body. In other words, it’s as though you could imagine several different rooms from the one furnished room.”
Space is a hostile environment to life as we know it, but with the help of thoughtful design and imagination space can also play host to environments that can expand the mind and spirit. This post explores some of the unique challenges and opportunities faced in the pursuit of creating enriching spaces for humans free of gravity.
THE ORIENTATION PROBLEM
Previous space stations have included a color-coding system of surfaces. The “floor” was usually darker and distinguished from the “walls” which was further distinguished from the “ceiling”. In a module such as those in the ISS, these surfaces are functionally identical, however the purpose for this differentiation was to aid the astronauts’ ability to orient themselves. Cylindrical modules such as those used in the construction of the Mir Space Station, the Salyut missions, and the ISS, are proportioned such that they can be interpreted in drastically different ways depending on one’s sense of the space.
In microgravity, the cochlear mechanism in the inner ear which provides the sense of orientation to the ground does not function, so at no time can one determine their orientation without relying on visual information. This lack of orientation is compounded by the sense of floating in microgravity as well, as this is the very same sensation one has while falling (indeed, astronauts and their vessels are falling around the Earth). If an astronaut is engaged in a distracting activity for a time, they can suddenly look to their surroundings and feel that they are no longer in a long corridor, but instead in a deep well and are falling. This does not happen in larger volumes where the surfaces are roughly equidistant from each other, such as the dome section of the Skylab Space Station (the largest free volume ever occupied by humans in space).
When space habitats are designed without respect to the ambiguous orientation provided by microgravity, additional measures such as the color-coding of surfaces may be employed, but they are ultimately crutches for undeveloped design, and indicative of a hindering reliance on the familiarity of designing (and training in) spaces on Earth.
LEAVING FLATLAND
As humans, we have a three-dimensional experience, but we only inhabit an insignificant fraction of the space that the Earth occupies. When it comes to how humans inhabit our dwellings, we only interact with a small portion of the environment’s surfaces on a regular basis. It can be partly described using the Square-Cube Law, wherein the volume of a space grows faster than its surface area, though this is not the whole story. Most of the surfaces in our environment are not available for practical use. We use the floor to walk on, most of the wall’s surfaces are not comfortable to access or interact with regularly due to being confined to our given height (in fact, the typical locations for utility are constrained by accessibility standards), and the ceiling is nearly always an inaccessible surface. This leaves a small percentage of the volume we inhabit that we can comfortably interact with. Were we to interact with all surfaces completely, it would represent a substantial increase to the efficiency of a given volume. This is the case in each of the examples of space stations, where all surfaces are used for any combination of equipment, work, storage, and even personalization. Open volumes can be even more efficient in microgravity; consider a grand ballroom in space – how many floating dancers could this space accommodate?
Without orientation to shoehorn our perception of a space, any orientation becomes correct and each adds to the possibilities of interpretation of and emotional connection with a space. A ceiling can become a floor or a wall, a hole in a wall can become an opening in the floor, and in a large-enough space the surfaces of the room may not even matter.In order to take full advantage of the 3-dimensional opportunity afforded by designing for space, larger volumes must be utilized. This true 3-dimensional space imagined by the likes of Salyut cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev can only be achieved if designers of weightless space habitats move beyond the familiar and expand into the possibilities of the third dimension.
