Travis Baldwin, lead product designer at DEEP, has worked with organisations including NASA, Frog Design, and IBM to develop new products and technologies, taking them from initial concepts to well considered products.

Here he shares five tips he’s learned from his 25 years as an industrial designer and explains how they are being used at DEEP.

1. Have a process that allows you to iterate quickly

When you’re doing something no one’s ever done before, it can be daunting. Remember that you have to start somewhere, and the first concepts aren’t going to be perfect. The best way to improve a design is to iterate.

Part of our process for design and engineering is sprinting to initial prototypes fast and learning from them.

For example, right now at DEEP we’re focused on building Vanguard as a step towards the Sentinel subsea human habitat system. Vanguard is a capability stepping project – a functional habitat we can get in the water fast and that can be tested at our quarry at DEEP’s Campus, so we can identify ways to improve the design.

Designing, building and testing our minimum viable concept will teach us things that we can only learn by interacting with the product at full scale. For example, technical challenges such as scientific materials safety, pressure testing, fire, and off-gas testing.

The first working Vanguard habitat will also allow us to verify our spaces work for eating, for sleeping, and for working underwater. Testing our assumptions in a controlled environment will allow future iterations to be better and better.

2. Scrutinise what’s gone before

Learning from what’s already been done is critical for a designer. Sometimes you marvel at the elegant simplicity of what was made and think, “I’m going to build on that approach!”. Other times you think, “Yeah that was good, but I reckon we could do it better if we did this…”

For our team, it started with looking at dozens of historical subsea habitats that have gone before, including Sealab. This is the only way to understand the aspects that have worked and to avoid any pitfalls that have happened previously. Vanguard may be a stepping stone but it’s also a real product and must be safe, comfortable, and allow the crew to perform their mission.

To better prepare for designing Vanguard, we visited NASA’s Aquarius Reef Base in the Florida Keys, where in the past my colleague Dawn took part in the NEEMO 21 mission. There we studied how missions were conducted and learned about the practicalities of operating a long-term subsea human habitat.

3. Visualise what you’re making (and not just in your mind’s eye)

3D computer aided design (CAD) is notorious for giving a false sense of scale. Every designer has zoomed into tiny details until they fill the screen, though you’d need a magnifying glass to see them in real life.

The opposite happens with crew compartments and cockpits – seeing a 3D model onscreen can be misleading because you cannot truly understand being within a space until you experience it full scale.

Using the engineering CAD, we’ve strived to use virtual reality (VR) effectively in our workflow. We initially used it to experience historical habitats that had come before, including Sealab and Conshelf, carefully built using old photographs and video as a reference.

We then used the VR experience to better understand the size and room layouts that divers lived in, and were able to experience them ourselves. We now have some of the best CAD models of past undersea habitats in existence, an asset we hope to be able to make available to the world in the future.

VR allows saturation divers to get a feel for the space we’ve designed for them and to provide feedback before we go to the next step of building life-size models. For example, we used it to test different moonpool and platform concepts when developing the wet porch for Vanguard, where divers will get in and out of the habitat.

4. Build a model

VR and renderings are great, and a quick way to show people what a design looks like in a way they won’t get from a drawing or a description. But to really start ironing out the kinks, you need to take things into the physical, tangible world. And that means wood – lots of it.

When I worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for Project Constellation, I went from being a designer of small-sized products to a kind of architect/industrial designer hybrid. My job title was ‘Space Architect.’ We were developing and then building crew quarters and cockpits for spacecraft out of foamboard and wood.

Our team would develop concept layouts within the crew compartment spaces given to us by the engineers, then we would get ‘astronaut test subjects’ to run through their standard tasks and procedures. To add realism, they would be kitted up in ‘Hollywood’ pretend space suits that were roughly the same size as the real thing, to test whether what we’d built gave them the space to do their jobs. Sometimes we’d even send our models up on the C-9 0-g plane to give tests even more realism for the weightlessness of space.

After NASA I had an opportunity to work on military vehicles, where again we were building full scale models from foam and wood, then testing with soldiers as subjects to learn how we could improve the spaces for them.

All these experiences have led to how we do things at DEEP. We talk to real saturation divers to understand what it’s like on deep sea missions and we’ve experienced as much as we can for ourselves, to be able to design and improve the next generation of subsea habitats.

To fine tune details of the preferred concept for the final engineered wet porch for Vanguard, we made a study model of just the moonpool for our dive team to evaluate (with our own style of Hollywood suits – space claim helmets and suits not shown).

Later the model increased in fidelity, allowing us to test kit mounting locations, cable and fluid routing, and other vital features in a full scale, easy to change prototype. It was fast to build, easy to change, and the engineering team began solving challenges in the model rather than on-screen.

5. Hunt down the unexpected

Often end users can’t articulate what they really want, so as designers we have to observe and look for what we call ‘latent needs’. In other words, needs people can’t or won’t share.

That’s especially the case with soldiers, astronauts, and divers, because they usually won’t complain (for lots of reasons). They will adapt to using things even if they don’t work very well.

So when we do VR tests and build models, we’re listening to what divers tell us but we’re also listening to how they describe their experiences and watching for what they’re not telling us.

We’ll be doing the same when Vanguard’s in the water. What can we do to make the divers’ missions better? How can the spaces be safer, but still comfortable? How can we surprise and delight them with the spaces we build and the features we put in?

We’re designing our subsea human habitats to be safe above all else, but we’re also designing them to be liveable so that researchers can fully focus on their work. And we also aspire to make the spaces aspirational and beautiful.