Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Pisces Project”.
My name is jimmy hazen, i’m from calgary alberta and i’m program manager of canadian space society. I’M jeff deboer, i’m a multimedia artist from calgary alberta, specializing in high-end fabrication. So what we brought here at maker faire is the pisces project and what the prices project is is a semi-autonomous robot that would accompany the astronauts on the international space station and provide some basic functions and support. Atmospheric monitoring, for example, and basic tool sets to be able to fetch tools that might float around in the space station, monitor experiments and when it’s not being used by the astronauts for space missions, it would provide space education programming through a web interface uh. What i’ve brought here is this idea that, if you’re going to spend a lot of time in space engineers will always engineer the most logical things, i’m trying to come around to the idea that we need to bring an aesthetic into space and that, if we’re going To spend a lot of time in space, if we don’t bring our humanity with us, will the journey be humane, so the thing that i’ve designed is this robotic fish, which is very aesthetic and maybe impractical, but it’s to serve as an aesthetic challenge to engineers to Try to bring something beautiful into space.
Reactions have been very positive for the most part uh. You know they love the concept. It’S a beautiful design and everybody’s just been in awe about how beautiful the object actually is and then, when they find out that it’s 3d printed uh that even impresses them quite even more from a design perspective, some some of the the real technical folks. You know they have questions about the propulsion systems and how we’re going to squeeze all those components into such a small object. And, of course you know.
The message here is that this is a collaborative and iterative process. We don’t necessarily have the design locked down what we our objective, is to actually have a um, an engagement with the general public, get them involved in the project so that the design can evolve as required to satisfy the needs by pushing the the the aesthetic design And the human aspect into into the space design, i think uh, my my favorite thing that i’ve noticed is uh. There’S such a huge amount of brain power in this in this uh building and collaboratively.
I i just imagine all the things that people are doing. It’S uh they’re, really pushing the envelope on design they’re, pushing the envelope on technology and, of course, the the collaborative spirit everybody’s willing to share and open ideas and uh and just talk about their different projects and how they can improve their projects. .