Message Delayed: Designing Interplanetary Communication Tools

[ UUID ] bebad396-382b-477d-bbe1-40e88fb8e6f4

[ Session Name ] Message Delayed: Designing Interplanetary Communication Tools [ Primary Space ] Openness [ Secondary Space ] Digital Inclusion

[ Submitter's Name ] Sands Fish [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] MIT Media Lab [ Submitter's GitHub ] @sandsfish

What will happen in your session?

When communicating in outer space, large delays are the norm. For instance, the communications delay between Earth and Mars can vary between five and twenty minutes depending upon the positions of the two planets. Although there are designs for an Interplanetary Internet that is fault-tolerant to transmission delays, how will conversations evolve when every response is delayed? Can we imagine new modes of messaging that enrich the way we have conversations on Earth as well? What kind of data might fill these gaps in our conversations? In this session, we will explore how comm lags can inspire new communication tools. The attendees will create new messaging clients that imagine what conversations will be like at the limits of lightspeed.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

The goal of the session is to engage participants in a participatory design process for delayed communication environments (removing the common assumption of instantaneous communication), to create a more open and inclusive design space for how we communicate, and to generate novel messaging designs that take advantage of the affordances of delay.

We will prototype a number of different conversational tools that take delay as an assumption and make creative use of this cadence, asking "How can slow communication create quality and creative modes of conversation?". In addition, we will discuss how we might design terrestrial applications that are more robust to slow connections.

A messaging API with artificial delay will be provided so that we can test our designs.

Time needed

90 mins