"Wherever mankind has set foot we leave a trail of junk, even space is not spared”
- Future Centre
- Future Centre
Description:
In this speculative project, I individually designed and prototyped a personal wearable unit to be worn by humans on Mars to provide and store daily water, oxygen, and food provisions.
Once a day, the system would filter out purified drinking water and oxygen from excreted urination, while storing proteins and sugars produced through solar energy, water, and man-emitted CO2 from an included photosynthesis-like bioreactor.
Process:
As a speculative piece, what made this design process unique was designing for what was plausible, but not quite yet possible. This meant taking everything into consideration at all times; because though I would not be physically building a ‘works-like' prototype of this model I needed to prove to anyone listening that such a design can be implemented provided the right scenario.
The research phase not only involved more traditional design research surrounding wearability, user-testing (pictured below), and iterative prototyping, but also research and foresight on current technology and where it could go in the foreseeable future.
Elements of my circular suit can be considered biomimetically designed as it pulls from nature's photosynthesis process to create a reactor that essentially does the same thing. Furthermore, I knew it possible to add food recycling and consumption into my design after learning of current successful research attempts at creating small-scale protein reactors.
Below are displayed images from the prototyping and research process. It demonstrates preliminary explorations of both full-body wearable units and smaller arm and leg-strapped devices.
early stage ideation
schematic of product functionality
lasercut diagram of product functionality
space suit fact-finding and research
early stage wearable exploration
early-stage prototype explored arm wearable
early-stage prototype explored leg wearable
