Sustainable Quality: From Space Stations To Everyday Contexts On Earth

Space stations are working places operating in extreme and isolated environments. In isolation, having no access to resources, these places need to be self-sufficient and sustainable and be able to reuse their resources. The transfer from extreme to domestic environments of the sustainable logic and technologies applied in these contexts has enormous potential for the quality of our everyday lives. This “sustainable quality” can be applied, for example, to address overpopulation and the increasing need for resources and can also be used for applications in megacities (Schlacht et al., 2015, 2014). In order to achieve “sustainability quality”, two main elements will be explained in this paper: a holistic methodology and a slow approach. To transfer the system logic from Space to Earth, we need to apply a holistic methodology. This can help us to understand each element of the system and their interrelations in the present as well as in the future considering the entire life-cycle. However, to implement quality of life, we also need to apply a slow approach. This slow approach outlines a new production and consumption model that is at the same time both subversive and feasible and focuses on the quality of the experience.