From Personal Fascination
to Design Research

Every strong thesis begins with a question that feels personal long before it becomes academic. The impulse to study something with rigour typically has its origin in an encounter that preceded methodology, literature reviews, and research frameworks — an encounter that left a residue of genuine curiosity, an unresolved wondering that no casual engagement could fully address. For me, the question at the centre of this research was simple in its formulation and extraordinarily complex in its implications: how do we design spaces that can hold human life in places that are not, by nature, designed to hold it at all?

The question arrived before I had the language to articulate it. It arrived as a child staring at a poster of the solar system, wondering not merely at the distances involved but at what it would mean to be inside that distance — to inhabit a volume of space so remote that the concept of home would require complete reinvention. It was a spatial question, even then. Not: can we reach Mars? But: what would it feel like to be there?

Fig. 1 — Research trajectory: the progression from personal curiosity through academic method to published design research. The thesis does not suppress personal investment — it uses it as the engine of inquiry. Diagram: author's own.

The Cafeteria on Mars: A First Design Inquiry

The first concrete design proposition that grew from this fascination was modest in its ambition and instructive in what it revealed. Asked in a first-year studio to design a speculative interior for a non-terrestrial context, I chose a communal dining space within a Mars habitat module — serving a crew of eight on a long-duration surface mission. The brief seemed simple. It became immediately clear that it was not.

Every conventional assumption about communal dining space — the relationship between preparation and consumption of food, the acoustic treatment appropriate to social interaction, the lighting strategy that supports both task-focused meal preparation and relaxed gathering, the material language that establishes warmth and domesticity — had to be fundamentally rethought in the light of the Martian context. The cafeteria, I came to understand, was not a service space. It was the most important room in the habitat.

"The interior architect working in extreme environments is not designing rooms. They are designing the conditions under which a human being can sustain their humanity. That is a different brief — and it demands a different intelligence."

Antarctica as Turning Point

The inflection point in my research trajectory was an extended engagement with the design literature and post-occupancy evaluation data from Antarctic research stations — particularly Concordia and Halley VI. What struck me most profoundly was not the technical ingenuity of the structural solutions but the degree to which the quality of the interior was consistently identified, in post-occupancy evaluations and crew testimonials, as the primary determinant of psychological wellbeing. Crews at Halley VI — whose Hugh Broughton Architects-designed station introduced a deliberately warm, material-rich interior aesthetic — reported markedly higher satisfaction scores across all habitability dimensions measured. This was empirical confirmation of what the design intelligence already suggested: interior architecture, in extreme environments, is co-primary with engineering as a determinant of mission success.

Vision: Interior Architecture as the Frontier Discipline

The design of extreme-environment habitats has largely been led by aerospace engineers, human factors specialists, and systems engineers. None of these practitioners are trained to design the spatial and material experience of an interior with the depth and intentionality that the conditions require. Interior architecture must position itself as the frontier discipline for the design of inhabited extreme environments — not as a decorator applied after engineering is complete, but as a co-designer from the earliest stages, contributing spatial intelligence, material knowledge, and human-centred design thinking to the complex, multidisciplinary enterprise of making space for human beings at the edge of what is possible.

The question that began with a child staring at a poster of the solar system has not become smaller through research. It has become larger, more specific, and more urgent. The stars are still there. And so, increasingly, are the spaces we must design to reach them.