Science Fiction Research Project - Moving to Mars Design Museum Exhibit

At the beginning of there year I visited the Design Museum in London to see the ‘Moving to Mars’ exhibit. This exhibit covered the whole concept and human history of the idea of moving to mars, from our first discovery of mars, to science fiction stories about martians, to mars rover projects to the actual plans in place that will be implemented to send the first humans to Mars in the next decade. 

This exhibit was incredibly interesting, mainly because I had no idea there were real plans in place for humans to go to, and one day colonise mars! It really did feel like some of these ideas and technology were science fiction, because they seemed so advanced. For example, it explained how the environment that the humans will live in on mars will be made. Robot/rovers will be primarily sent too mars; in a designated spot they will; inflate big pods which will be living quarters for the astronauts. These pods all connect to form a cluster of rooms. Then the robots will pile mars earth and ground over the tops of these pods to insulate and secure them.

What I also found really interesting was that even the most mundane and small things had to be taken into thorough consideration for these plans. The efficiency of what the astronauts will pack in the rocket has to be thought of down to the milligram. Every single item and space on the ship has to be used as efficiently as possible, because once they’re there, there’s no going back. This lead to a lot of ideas of how materials could be recycled or repurposed to have extra utility, which i9 think is a really interesting concept thinking ahead to a product I could produce for this project. As part of this idea of repurposing materials, clothing brand ‘Raeburn’ created a line of outfits that are all made of materials that will be on the mars ship, such as the parachute material. 

There was also a really interesting product in this exhibition which addressed the astronauts mental health, it was a pair of gloves that were attached, these gloves could be given any scent that reminded the astronaut of home or Earth, and that way if the astronaut felt overwhelmed or upset, they could put these gloves on and out there head/face in their hands and smell that family Earth smell. 

Even though a lot of this exhibition wasn’t science fiction at all, it was real plans, technologies, ideas or products, some of these things where so farfetched that they could ahem easily been part of a science fiction story. What the products and insights into efficiency, repurposing and functionality in this exhibition really made me consider was the more everyday aspects of a science fiction future. Sure, any given science fiction future could be incredibly farfetched or unrealistic, eg. The earth has been taken over by super-intelligent tigers, but what do every day commercial items or products look like ion this future reality? How does this effect the graphic design and communication being produced? 

It would be really fun to look at an exciting future science fiction concept in this project; space travel, aliens, time travel etc. But I think it would be very interesting to almost have this massive exciting future as as the backdrop to a project where actually I focus on something  commercial or consumer within this future reality, how it differs and why. Because this would be more engaging to view and experience  because comparisons can be drawn between current examples of it. This is what I touched on before in my research - some of the best examples of sci - fi are those that still integrate current parts of our culture/society/technology because when experiencing these examples, they’re more convincing and believable but also more recognisable.