If you’re wondering what new skills you should learn this summer, and you live in or are comfortable moving to Milan, maybe you should check out Susmita Mohanty’s class at Domas Academy entitled “Products and Microenvironments for Orbiting Hotels.” Mohanty is an “aerospace entrepreneur” and has worked on the International Space Station and the Shuttle-Mir missions, so she seems like a good choice to teach a class on designing products to allow for a comfortable stay for orbiting tourists.
Here’s an excerpt from the course description:
This course will introduce designers and architects, both students and practicing professionals to the world of zero-gravity (zero-g) design. On Earth, we often take a lot of things for granted, for example – gravity, atmospheric pressure, natural illumination and the entire gamut of colors that it brings to us. Living in Earth Orbit is a whole new world where designers and architects have to account for not just weightlessness and vacuum, but also come up with creative antidotes for isolation, confinement, boredom, sensory deprivation, bone-muscle atrophy, as well as social-psychological-and-cultural stressors characteristic of living in cramped spaces where privacy is limited and so are resources. This course will groom designers and architects to work for space tourism companies.
Honestly it sounds pretty much like living in New York City, but that just means the stuff these students design can be of use to more people than just super-rich tourist astronauts, which will now be referred to as touristronauts, which is also the name of a defunct ska band, probably.
[via Boing Boing]
