Affecting Emotions with Sensponsive Design: A Habitable Spacecraft Module Experiment

The design of habitable spacecraft modules in the past was viewed as an engineering problem. As missions increased in duration, the issue of liveability gradually became an issue of habitability, opening the way for architects to contribute to the design of a functional interior. This paper presents an emerging field in the cross-section of design and technology titled sensponsive architecture. The term sensponsive is a combination of the words sense and responsive. While a responsive design approach is applied to help a structure react to environmental changes, a sensponsive approach is user-centered, employing the same technology to ensure the spatial and psychological comfort of the user. It is the product of a flexible, transformable, technology-mediated architecture with intelligent systems seamlessly incorporated into the created environment, in this case the interior of a spacecraft module, to exhibit a programmed behavior in direct relation to the human activity within. The activity is evaluated through three diagnostic layers, the spatial layer, the perceptual layer and the experiential layer. The sensponsive configuration is based upon two active systems, the Activity Evaluation System (AES) and the Response System (RS) which act in combination by directing subtle spatial (volume, surface) and ambient (audio, visual, olfactory, haptic) changes when necessary. It acts discreetly, firstly by understanding the conditions and the context in which they take place and then by responding to them accordingly with sense. A sensponsive spacecraft environment aims to provide beneficial living conditions for the astronauts and address spatial qualities along with activity-related issues that emerge from prolonged isolation and confinement.