An architect in space by Jenny Brown (Credit: Sydney Morning Herald, October 9, 2008)

HER work scenario is literally out of this world. Italian architect and designer Annalisa Dominoni finds herself working at the farthest frontier of design in being one of the few women creating life-enhancing equipment used by astronauts.

In her 40s and fashionably stylish in a way that reflects her Milanese base, Professor Dominoni been working with NASA and the European Space Agency for the past decade.

She says she thrives on design challenges that demand she throw out assumptions of how things should be or should operate because, save for underwater environments, there is no comparable terrestrial environment for the complex challenges presented by the weightlessness of space.

It's a ground zero design laboratory, she says. "It is a pioneering area that takes us all the way back from the concept of comfort to the concept of survival. When you design for space, you have to think about every object in a totally new way."

How, for instance, does an astronaut shower when water "which is such a precious thing anyway, doesn't fall down?"

How would a washing machine work? In finding solutions to practical problems for the manned International Space Station, Professor Dominoni worked with colleagues on the prototype of cleaning clothes by using a vacuum system rather than one with water.

How do astronauts keep muscle tone and fitness when there is no resistance to work with in a space station and when the body needs at least two hours physical exercise a day?

To get weight-bearing and aerobic results, this architect of far-out industrial design devised a simple piece of equipment that could be used on limbs and in any direction.

How did this student of architecture, whose path in Italy should have been remodelling historic houses, end up designing space shoes that stick to surfaces and space suits made of nanotechnology-imbued fibres that regulate heat and have antibacterial properties?

Her PhD was inspired by her fascination developed at an early age for astronauts, space and innovative technologies. She then checked around space agencies "to find out what sort of role an architect could play in that very complex environment", she says. She presented her doctorate to the European Space Agency, which was impressed enough to find a role for the only woman working in the field and one of the very few architects working with engineers and physicists.

She says there "were only men, so at 27 it was a little difficult for a young woman"

But it was exhilarating to be asked to conceive "small, light and very flexible objects" and to bring a female perspective to "design anthropology" - the needs of human beings in space.

She was able to recast the accepted male perspective of people as just another part of the machinery of a space station.

Professor Dominoni says she considered the astronauts as humans needing well-being and comfort "rather than as robots".

"I tried to explain that increasing the well-being of the astronauts was the way to increase the mission's resources because if you are well, you can work more efficiently."

That has also led her to designing a tool kit that enables astronauts to use objects in different ways.

"You have to think how an astronaut uses every object; which way, which hand, which position? You have to be able to imagine another world and apart from space, there are very few opportunities (in design) to do this."

She acknowledges the collaborative process of working across disciplines with others who have expertise in very specific fields.

In her recent visit to Swinburne University to teach workshops on the "architecture of the small" to students - professional designers and architects - she showed that designers can turn their hands to the most extraordinarily innovative tasks.

Professor Dominoni, who runs her own practice SPIN-DESIGN LAB and teaches in the design faculty of the Politecnico DiMilano, came to Australia on a teaching fellowship organised by the International Specialist Skills Institute that for two decades has scoured the globe for inspiring experts in professions that are under-represented in this country.

Institute chief executive officer Carolynne Bourne says Professor Dominoni illustrates the "benefits of crossover in bringing different headspaces together to be able to work differently in all sorts of professions.

"Collaboration is the shape of work in the future," she says. "You need all those new links to pull together to create something new and to get to new solutions. Otherwise, you just get replication of replication of replication.

"Once you have these collaborative abilities you can, as Annalisa demonstrates, work in any dimension."

For information on the institute's workshops contact 98820055 or issinstitute.org.au.

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