About the Conference

Our one-day workshop will consist of a keynote lecture, research presentations, lively discussion, and group brainstorming. Following research presentations, small focus groups will be assigned to breakout sessions where they will design short user scenarios related to an HCI technology intervention or countermeasure. The topics could address the potential of an emerging technology solution in a spaceflight context, a particular form factor, or could be used as an opportunity to highlight a human-centered problem requiring further research. Groups will design a “day in the life” narrative showing a scenario of use for the technology, intervention, or countermeasure. Groups will be encouraged to storyboard interactions visually, or to act out the scenarios in a “skit” format. Successes, failures, and future potential of the narrative scenarios will be deliberated in the discussion.

Suggested topics / areas:

• On-body/Wearable Technology for Space Health
• Human-Robot Interaction for Deep Space Mission
• Interfaces for Human Expression in Space
• Trust within Autonomous and Intelligent Systems
• Cognitive load and Human Performance Issues
• Computer-supported Cooperative Work
• Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality
• Smart Vehicle and Habitat
• Digital Fabrication for Space Mission

Keynote Speaker

Dava Newman

Dava Newman is the director of the MIT Media Lab. She holds  the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is a Harvard–MIT Health, Sciences, and Technology faculty member in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow (a chair for  making significant contributions to undergraduate education); and was the former Director of the Technology and Policy  Program at MIT (2003–2015); and Director of the MIT–Portugal Program (2011–2015, 2017-2021). As the Director of MIT’s  Technology and Policy Program (TPP), she led this unique multidisciplinary graduate program with over 1,300 alums and faculty  advisors from all 5 Schools across the Institute. She has been a faculty leader in  Aeronautics and  Astronautics and MIT’s School of Engineering for 28 years. She holds a top-secret clearance.  

The Honorable Dr. Dava Newman served as NASA Deputy Administrator (2015-2017). Nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate  unanimously in April 2015. Along with the NASA Administrator, she was responsible for articulating the agency’s vision,  providing overall leadership and policy direction, and representing NASA to the Executive Office of the President, Congress,  heads of federal government agencies, international space agencies, and industry. 

Ariel Ekblaw

Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of over 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty actively prototyping the artifacts of our sci-fi space future. Founded in 2016, the Initiative now includes a portfolio of 40+ research projects focused on life in space (from astrobiology to space habitats), and supports an accelerator-like R&D program that enables a broad range of payload development. For the Initiative, Ariel drives space-related research across science, engineering, art, and design, and charters an annually recurring cadence of parabolic flights, sub-orbital, and orbital launch opportunities. Ariel forges collaborations on this work with MIT departments and space industry partners, while mentoring Initiative research projects and providing technical advice for all mission deployments. 

In addition to the broader Initiative portfolio, her personal research builds on her MIT PhD (completed September 2020) in space architecture and the TESSERAE platform: Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments. This work explores autonomously self-assembling space architecture for future space tourist habitats and space stations in orbit around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. 

Melodie Yashar

Melodie Yashar is a space architect, technologist, and researcher. She is the VP of Building Design & Performance at ICON, a construction technologies company focused on large scale additive manufacturing for Earth and in space. Melodie oversees the architectural direction of ICON’s built work as well as the performance of ICON’s building systems to deliver optimally-performing structures that shift the paradigm of homebuilding on Earth and beyond. Collaborating across technology and construction teams, her department supports the design and construction of dignified and resilient terrestrial housing solutions in addition to supporting the development of ICON’s off-world construction systems. Notable projects of hers include Mars Ice House and Mars X-House, both first prize winners in design within NASA’s Centennial Challenge for a 3D-Printed Habitat on Mars, as well as design and construction of the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Her TED talk, ”How to Build for Human Life on Mars” has been viewed over 1.4 million times.

Melodie teaches undergraduate and graduate design studios at Art Center College of Design. In previous roles Melodie was a Senior Research Associate with the Human Systems Integration Division at NASA Ames via San Jose State University Research Foundation (SJSURF), a co-founder of Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+), a research group developing human-supporting designs for space exploration, as well as a Professor within the Architecture department of Pratt Institute. Melodie obtained a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and a Master of Human-Computer Interaction for Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. She geeks out on new material & fabrication technologies. She likes tiny robots. She would like to visit the Moon (though not yet Mars) in her lifetime.

Scott Davidoff

Dr. Scott Davidoff has over 25 years experience turning open-ended and ambiguous problems into novel product concepts all the way through to shippable products. As a practitioner, Dr. Davidoff leads the design and development of the software currently used to command NASA spacecraft, and to interrogate planetary scale datasets. He has also led the design and development of consumer products for companies that include AT&T, Concur + Morgan Stanley.

As a researcher, he leads the teams that imagine how Augmented and Virtual Reality, and Data Visualization can be used to command tomorrow’s space missions, and has created several of the lightweight prototyping methods that are now practiced at companies like Google and Microsoft, and part of the design curriculum at universities like Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Davidoff serves on program committees for organizations that include the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and ACM’s Computer Human-Interaction (CHI).