12-05, 11:40–12:00 (Europe/Luxembourg), Banquet Room
Background
Project Hyperion is a conceptual study of a hypothetical interstellar generation ship. Since 2023, the Hyperion team has been working on organizing an interdisciplinary design competition on the habitat of the generation ship. Design competitions have proven to be an effective means of generating a variety of designs to explore a novel design space. The highly interdisciplinary nature of generation ship habitats, spanning architecture, engineering, and social sciences makes it a particularly challenging design problem.
Objective
This talk presents the system architecting process to define the Project Hyperion competition, which includes the steps of defining the context, system boundaries, system and sub-system-level requirements and constraints.
Methods
We use concepts from architecture (functional spaces), social sciences (cultural invariants), and engineering (habitat geometries, bioregenerative life support systems) to combine them into an integrated socio-technical framework, where the focus is on the interdependencies between the features of the habitat and the society’s structure.
Results
We present the first results from the competition and where the designs are situated in the design space. Designs with unusual positioning are also presented.
Conclusions
We conclude that an iterative approach to define competitions and an analysis of the resulting designs may efficiently steer the process of converging towards a baseline architecture for a generation ship habitat.
