Banking on Affective Design for Mars Missions

6 min readAug 8, 2024

Musings On How To Flourish in the Day to Day

Wow. I did not get very far in my participant observation yesterday after putting together an initial mood board for identifying a new set of stakeholders capable of achieving a human space mission to Mars. This is based on the space systems engineering course I just started in the last day or two.

One could say, I didn’t flourish in my attempt to explore the concept of time and skill banking. Flourishing is important. And as a creative in the age of technological expansion, figuring out how to keep flourishing is of the utmost importance to me. So when in doubt of my approach, I turn to MIT for inspiration. One group, in particular, maintains my curiosity like no other. It is the Affective Computing group led by Rosalind Picard whose primary motivations are to help people who are not flourishing or at risk of not flourishing’. One component they bold on their site is ‘enabling robots and computers to respond intelligently to natural human emotional feedback’.

Group Overview ‹ Affective Computing - MIT Media Lab

Advancing human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion

www.media.mit.edu

One place I know I’ve flourished is at Brewery Run Clubs. And now I’m asking myself: why? And answers to this question can be generalized to all people and the cultural organizations they dynamically comprise?

If you recall, I am trying to see what it is that people at breweries do that could relate to trading each other’s time and skills without ever exchanging money. Yesterday I ended up at a wine bar named Smashing Grapes and I observed zero people. I failed, you guys. I DID NOT FLOURISH.

While I was hanging out with my dog on the patio I read some Wikipedia entries on Time Based Currency.

Time-based currency - Wikipedia

In economics, a time-based currency is an alternative currency or exchange system where the unit of account is the…

en.wikipedia.org

The results surprised me because I found out it’s been around for over a hundred years.

And for banks today, I’m surprised that I have not found any major banks using it as a value add-on to the communities they serve. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there could prove me wrong. So, I have not accomplished my participant observation yet.

My problem is that there are no breweries close to me in Columbia, Maryland. To add fuel to this fire, my dog loves breweries and I don’t think he is happy right now. So I am moving closer to some, because I am truly dedicated to this task. I’ve identified some breweries that seem like a great place to observe participant in the following map on the James River.

I think I will start with Legion Brewing. To make it simple, I will plan on adapting any method for stakeholder analysis as an output of participant observation as an input.

This will require taking exercises from Edwin Hutchins, one of the principal developers of the theory of distributed cognition and of the methods of cognitive ethnography (what some may label participant observation) [2].

In his project presentation in Paris, he seems to highlight the cultural organization of human experience and its relation to how an architecture from general artificial intelligence might interact with structures and processes internal and external to people. I’m interested in tackling just the first part: cultural organization.

The process of interest is his Schema Theory Propositional Calculus:

Learn the language, make dictionary
Ethnography of gardening practices and land litigation (Basically ‘People Watching’)
Schemas for transfer of rights in land
Document the history of the people and land parcels in question
Audio recording, analysis and transcription

This simple exercise will create a simple table by which one could map word usage, time and skill trading, ways of transferring them, a micro slice of history in the people of 2024 during the adoption of generative artificial intelligence with respect to how they transfer time and skills, all in context of analysis rooted in the things they actually said.

That table will help us identify the stakeholders that we want to understand from a systems engineering perspective, found in slides from MIT Aero Astro Instructor Olivier de Weck [3]::

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

In his course, Instructor Olivier highlights systems decomposition and their levels until the person taking a device apart can not find a part that is divisible. For illustration, I’ve provided a picture form Florian Klauer of a Lady Adler Typewriter.

I like to view ideas from Edwin Hutchins on distributed cognition through the analogy of the components in an environment, for which the typewriter might have been one in a scene of many environmental components. When you sit down to type, all your thoughts are bound by a similar environment. This is why defining your environment is paramount because it is the substrate by which your thoughts emerge.

He then goes on to show us the NASA systems engineering handbook [4], systems engineering history, and its V-Model. I interpret the V-Model to be a means of making sure something works through a process of building it and testing that it works as it’s supposed too.

This is where we transition into stakeholder expectations definitions and a discussion of who is affected by what gets made or those who are accountable for what was made.

I want to stop there. What is getting made and who is accountable for it? Let’s avoid philosophy or big words.

I’m making a mood board, a table that reflects cultural organization around time and skill trading at a brewery in 2024, and the AI assignment from MIT’s Aero Astro Fundamentals of Systems Engineering: Team Formation, Definitions, Stakeholders, Concept of Operations (CONOPS) [5].

This output can be used by anyone hoping to understand how to create digital tools for people who want to exchange their time and knowledge. Specifically, the next generation of astronauts who refuse to wait for anyone to give them permission. A generation of astronauts who expect accountability from themselves so that they can produce the finest quality of products for those who will colonize Mars, bar none.It is my hypothesis that Banks will be the most interested in parties in this ongoing study, if they truly wish to adapt and meet the needs of humanity as it moves from the moon to Mars [6] .

With this in mind, here is my updated task plan: