Industrial Design and Aerospace: A Methodological Prespective

The new targets of human exploration (Moon and Mars) involve the extention of mission duration time. to face the long-term exploration a deeper investigation on issues related to human beings and hability in space is required. These issues entail that engineering disciplines will be integrated into multidisciplinary teams. This raises the problem of the definition of an interdisciplinary porcess, that can allow people from diferent disciplines (biologists, psychologiss, architects, designers, geologists...) to work together to achieve the same goal. This paper presents a description of aerospace engineering and industrial designapproches in order to find possibilities of integration into an interdisciplinary design process. The methodology currently used in aerospace field for design of systems and elements will be described ad compared to the approach conventionally used by industrial designers in non-aerospace applications.