% title ISSDC Training: Design Requirements

<title>International Space Settlement Design Competition</title>

<div class=paragraph>

<h2>Establishing Design Requirements</h2>

<p>Practitioners of engineering design learn early in their careers that
successful designs respond to requirements. Although the Space Settlement
Design Competition Request for Proposal (RFP) lists the customer's basic
requirements for your team's space settlement design, there are a lot
of implied requirements in the requests for a &quot;pleasant living
and working environment&quot; and &quot;a comfortable modern community
environment&quot;. Your team needs to think about what the judges will be
expecting--think of your space settlement as a place where people will
raise their families and build their careers, and think of the judges
as the people who need to be convinced that they will want to live
there. The better your team's design proposal shows a space settlement
that will be a pleasant place to live, the more likely your team is to
win an invitation to the Finalist Competition. Participants will also
come up with better designs if they develop an appreciation for why the
RFP includes what it does. </p>

<p>The design requirements for space settlements derive from the simple
question &quot;what do people need that doesn't exist in space?&quot;; the
simple answer to this question is &quot;just about everything&quot;. </p>

<p>During the Finalist Competition, we use a tool to help participants
appreciate just how much &quot;everything&quot; really is. The
&quot;BRAINSTORMING&quot; SESSION is a process that gets a group of people
with knowledge about the problem into a room, sets their minds free to
release any thought that occurs to them, and captures those thoughts
for further analysis. Typically, brainstorming sessions are used in
industry to solve problems. For Space Settlement Design Competitions,
this is a very useful technique for helping participants identify the
problems that their designs must solve. </p>

<h3>Brainstorming</h3>

<p>For Brainstorming to work, very rigid rules must be established.
There are three distinct parts to the process: </p>

<ul>
<li>Free-wheeling non-critical idea-generating session </li>
<li>Review ideas--toss unworkable, frivolous, and redundant ideas; group similar ideas </li>
<li>Document the ideas generated--make sure all participants get a copy of the idea list </li>
</ul>

<p>This process may be iterated by doing further sessions to develop
detailed ideas that will make a concept feasible. </p>

<p>Brainstorming has gone out of favor in industry, mostly because
people usually only do the first step, and not the critical follow-up
exercises. The first step is what's fun, but the ideas are only cemented
and made useful through analysis and documentation. </p>

<p>The idea-generating session itself can have some pitfalls, too.
If the following rules are followed, however, there is no better tool
for rapidly developing a wide-ranging collection of creative ideas: </p>

<ul>
<li>The statement of the problem to be addressed is agreed to with
all participants </li>

<li>Participants say every idea that they think of </li>

<li>Every idea is written by the facilitator or an assistant, so that
all participants can see (on large sheets of paper, overhead projector
transparencies, or a projected computer image) </li>

<li>No idea is criticized during the session </li>

<li>The facilitator(s) and scribe(s) only add ideas
generated by the participants </li>

</ul>

<p>It is essential that every idea be written, no matter how dumb,
and that no idea be criticized during the idea-generating session. Dumb
ideas that occur to creative people act like dams; until the dumb idea is
released, it will stop the flow of more creative ideas. By not allowing
criticism, there is no stigma attached to announcing a dumb idea, and
it can be removed during the second step of the process. Oddly, release
and documentation of a dumb idea will frequently ignite a creative spark
in another participant, and may lead to the idea that provides the best
solution to the problem. These sessions can get pretty frisky, and it
is generally accepted that an optimum size for a Brainstorming group
is between 10 and 15 (you want everybody to contribute ideas; with a
smaller group, nobody has an excuse for not speaking up).  If there
is extra room, split the participants into two groups, have them run
separate Brainstorming sessions, and compare the results. </p>

<h3>Problem Statement</h3>

<p>For Space Settlement Design Competitions, we generally conduct
Brainstorming sessions with the following problem statement: </p>

<p>What does a community of humans need to stay alive, healthy, and
happy in space? </p>

<p>We are constrained for time during Space Settlement Design
Competitions, and will usually only run the idea-generating session
for 10 to 20 minutes. During that time, it is not unusual for the
scribe(s) to get a list of ideas six or seven hand-written transparency
pages long.  Sessions based on this problem statement can easily last
for 30 to 45 minutes (sessions in industry often run for one and a
half to two hours). The facilitator can keep the session going by
asking questions that will direct thinking processes out of a rut,
perhaps coming back to a thought pattern that didn't appear to have
played itself out, or steering thinking along a different track. If
participants have been concentrating on the &quot;healthy&quot; part
of the question, the facilitator may suggest that the question also
includes &quot;happy&quot;. The facilitator may remind participants
that the question includes the word &quot;community&quot;.  Sometimes,
just the reminder that you want participants to &quot;speak up!&quot;
or &quot;tell me ANYTHING that comes into your head!&quot; will get the
ideas flowing again. </p>

<p>When you analyze the list your team ends up with, you will find what
we have found in dozens of experiences with Brainstorming on this problem
statement: the first few minutes will concentrate on &quot;technical&quot;
needs, but the majority of the ideas would apply to any community of
humans anywhere. The Brainstorming session ends up being a terrific
tool for reminding participants that people have the same needs no
matter where they live, and we must make sure that our personal needs
are met by the technical design.  Incidentally, no significance should
be attached during analysis of your list to specifics of the order in
which the ideas were written. </p>

<p>When you finish categorizing, fleshing out, and documenting the
ideas that come from your Brainstorming session, you will have a set of
requirements from which to start developing design details, especially
those regarding interior design and general habitability.  The customers'
RFP defines minimum requirements for the project; winning teams both
meet the requirements and develop a design in which the customer would
like to live.

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