“Let’s meet on Mars and talk about the future.”

Reaching out to Krys a few days before the successful launch of the Mars rover Perserverance on July 30, 2020, I am delightfully reminded of the role passion plays in creativity and innovation. Kry’s role could be defined as next-decade design - trying to figure out what a mission will look like 10 years down the road, and working with teams of designers, engineers, and scientists to bring that vision to reality. “As we search for life on Mars, Enceladus, or Europa, and dream of life in distant solar systems, I imagine paving a way to a future when the citizens of one Earth meet the citizens of some other planet. Will those people have the same social structures and struggles that we do?”

She waxes philosophical for a moment. “Will they have art and compassion and some understanding of the nature of the universe that expands our own? I may not see that future, but along with countless others, I can do my infinitesimally small part to help us get there.”

The following story originally ran in the October 2019 issue of The Creative Factor newsletter. The Mars rover we paid a call on would officially be named Perserverance in March of 2020.

Visiting Mars

I am standing on Mars. It’s dry, dusty, and as one might expect – hot. I am definitely overdressed.

Next to me, Krys Blackwood, Senior Lead UX Designer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shields her eyes from the sun with one hand and squints to try and get a better look across the dusty red landscape. “We’ll have to stay here,” she informs me, “because Maggie is out.”

We’re not actually standing on Mars, of course, but rather in the Mars Yard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Mars Yard is where teams test out new software and commands for the Mars rovers. Curiosity rover has been traversing the surface of Mars for just over seven years now; Maggie is her “engineering spare,” an earthbound relation that can learn on-the-job so Curiosity doesn’t have to. “We bring in dirt and mix it up to match Martian regolith,” Krys explains. (Regolith turns out to be a combination of dirt, broken pieces of rock, and other detritus that covers solid rock. And yes, I had to look that up.) “We re-terraform it to match the terrain that the Curiosity rover is in at the moment. If there is something we’re not sure about because we’ve never done it before, we test it here, where we know that if the rover is going to fall over, we can pick it up.”

We make our way gingerly around the perimeter of the Mars Yard to get a closer look at Maggie. Only, as it turns out, it might not be Maggie after all. “Look at the wheels! Those wheels look different,” says Krys. This appears to be Maggie’s sibling, the engineering spare for Mars 2020, the as-yet-unnamed rover that is due to take off for the red planet next summer. We stand for a moment, gazing in combined reverence. Then we both take out our phones to snap pictures.

I find myself on Mars by way of Krys’s kind invitation to tour JPL, whose campus is nestled in a dusty arroyo in the greater LA area. Why? Because there is a fascinating world of higher-stakes, user-driven design that we don’t often get a window into. The UI for an insulin pump or an EKG machine, for example – or the software used to send a mission into deep space. Both require clear, effective design; neither catch headlines quite as often as the latest car or pair of consumer headphones.

The challenging problems Krys and her team are tackle have far-reaching implications, but the origins of the solutions they deliver are familiar. To observe the work being done at JPL is to also understand how similar processes, passions, and dedication unite design as a whole, and how the skills learned in everyday sorts of projects can prepare you for work on extraordinary endeavors.

The Center of the Universe

Krys takes us inside The Space Flight Operations Facility—aka Mission Control—and my inner space nerd is trying hard to act cool. “This is the exact center of the universe,” she says. There is even a plaque in the middle of the floor to prove it. “Because really the universe is infinite, but we decided that this is the center.”

Krys’s full title is Senior Lead UX Designer and Technical Group Lead for the Human-Centered Design group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her email signature captures her working ethos in a single, unequivocal phrase: “I fight for the user.”

In addition to design, UX, and research, she is trained in emergency services, and writes science fiction novels, a background she puts to good use when running simulation workshops and brainstorming exercises. “It’s very easy for engineers to think about how things are, and all of the practical implications. But I say no, bring your science fiction mindset. Pretend it’s magic, and we can do anything.”

Even as she began her career with large Silicon Valley stalwarts, she always knew that working with NASA was where she wanted to be. “I applied at NASA Ames, which is the other California NASA center, for 10 years,” she says. It was later, when the UX team at JPL was looking for a senior designer, that a former colleague spoke up and said he knew just the person for the job. 

Krys was invited to JPL to do the same tour that she is now taking me on. “I was actually on my way to a science fiction convention. I stopped here, and my former colleague gave me a tour. And I left here feeling like, This is the place. I was also thinking, I’m about to go to fake space and this place is much cooler,” she recalls. “Unbeknownst to me, that tour was actually my first interview.”

Designing for Deep Space

Mission Control is where the Deep Space Network, or DSN, has operated and monitored all interplanetary and deep space exploration for NASA since 1963. The Deep Space Network itself is a collection of giant radio antennas located all over the world that are used to track, control,  and monitor spacecraft like Curiosity and Mars 2020, as well as a valuable instruments for scientific research, like radio astronomy. Every day, operators are sending out signals and commands to the various spacecraft; they collect, decode, and distribute that data in return. 

Krys’s team works on everything from software design for the on-the-ground operators of the DSN, to creating the software to help design the missions themselves. The complexities of space operations can at times be daunting, and the users themselves—the engineers, scientists, and operators— are slow to acclimatize to new ideas and concepts. 

The team is currently developing a new visual vocabulary for the DSN, and have been testing it extensively with DSN operators. The operators monitor a large collection of screens, all teeming with live data. Each new task they undertake spawns additional screens, and they must continually parse volumes of fresh information if they hope to detect potential problems. With the new software, Krys hopes to help alleviate the crushing aspects of carrying such a cognitive load over an eight-hour shift.

“The new tools use are optimized for readability, so they (the operators) can get to the piece of information they need quickly,” says Krys. The new software also streamlines tasks, and introduces automation for others. In testing, it increased the operators’ “time to find” by 50%, without reducing accuracy. Surely, the engineers and scientists were thrilled? “No,” she says. “Change is bad.”

Skepticism is par for the course, and there’s good reason for that: “Every time you make a change, you introduce risk to the system,” explains Krys.  “And then you lose data that you’re never going to get back, or you lose a spacecraft, or you lose a 10 million-pound antenna. Or you don’t have the opportunity to do it again, and you’ve just spent 15 years of your life working on the implementation. Here, change has a billion-dollar price tag.”

The Five-Year Beta Test

We dive into this topic a bit more as we walk to the Spacecraft Assembly Facility, hoping for a glimpse of Mars 2020 (sadly, we just miss her; she’s been moved in preparation for heading to Florida, where she’ll be launching from Cape Canaveral). Krys credits her ability to traverse the intricacies of developing software for space exploration to her early work at companies like Cisco, TinyPrints, and Caring.com (where she was the Director of UX). 

“Salespeople and doctors are similarly change-resistant, because every time you change their systems, they need to re-learn tasks, and you slow them down. This taught me how to work with people who were reluctant to change, even when the change would be an improvement.”

Involving users as early in the process as is feasible is solid strategy even when you aren’t working with heavily change-resistant users. Krys is a big fan of extended, broad-release betas:  as many users as possible, testing for an extended period of time.  

I ask how long a typical beta runs at JPL. “Five years!” she says, laughing. “An average project is 15 years long. When I was working in Silicon Valley, I could run a beta for a week. Sometimes I’d get lucky and they let me do it for three months. But I’ll take as long as I can, because I think the longer you can give people to get used to change, the better. Especially when lives or livelihoods are on the line.” 

Proving the benefits of a user experience practice has been an exercise in small wins, all of which go towards establishing credibility—and now demand—for the team’s unique approach to problem-solving. And with each small victory, another convert is won. Krys’s team even conducts design sprints with groups of engineers and scientists now, something that would have been written off as folly only a few years ago. And whereas the team was originally only brought in during later, less critical phases of a project, they’re now being called upon in the earliest stages. 

“We were always involved in Phase E or Phase F—in the archival state,” she recounts. “And then we got involved in Europa Clipper (a mission to the smallest of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, to test if conditions exist to support life) in Phase B. And then Europa Lander involved us in Pre-Phase A. So the little successes we’ve had have opened the door for more opportunity for the team to grow.”

Krys credits her team for being open, engaged, and most importantly, willing to be wrong. “That approach is exactly the right one,” she says, “Because that humility really resonates with the system engineers who are also delighted to be wrong, because they want to eventually be right.”

Let’s Meet on Mars

Krys takes me into the Ops Lab, 2 rooms with desks and workstations at which intensely-focused coders sit; there are some couches and an oversized monitor in one corner, and a VR station in another. It’s pin-drop quiet, with just the hum of machines and the sound of tapping on keyboards.

“This is the room that started it all for us,” she explains. “Up until recently, every mission that ever flew was designed by emailing Excel spreadsheets back and forth between two hundred engineers. And yet, it worked. But we built them a UI for a mathematical model.” This allowed the engineering teams see changes in real-time, shaving months from the development phase of a mission.

“Now we can do concurrent engineering in a single model-based environment, and have information that instantly updates. If an instrument guy adds in a telescope, the power guy sees his power drain go immediately. They can collaborate and test out different options much faster.”

To Krys, the primary objective is to provide her end-users – in this case, the scientists and engineers – with the best possible tools. “If you have a new problem with your spacecraft—the reaction wheel isn’t spinning with the same efficiency that it used to, or the solar panels are starting to degrade – you update that model. Ground Control has access to it, because it all lives in one place. There’s the single source of Truth. They can now run all of their projections based on that,” she explains. “It’s our hope that as these processes mature here, they theoretically could be adopted for the International Space Station systems, or they could be adopted for future manned space mission systems.” 

Krys’s team was also responsible for introducing a completely new tool to the scientists and engineers of Mars 2020: three-dimensional VR. This opened up a whole new way of visualizing the surface of the planet, as well as a fresh paradigm for planning exploration. You would think that such an incredible leap forward would make instant fans out of the scientists. But...again, no. “They were like, ‘This is a gadget,’” says Krys. “And then they tried it, and the geologists were the first to say, ‘Oh, this changes everything.’” 

When a geologist goes out to a site, the first thing he or she does is to go to the highest point and look around, in order to understand the terrain. “No rock means anything without that context. This was the first time they could do that,” Krys explains. “And now the whole team will have meetings on Mars. The mission team will be like, ‘Let’s meet on Mars, and talk about the future.’ They can walk around and say, what do you think about this rock? Or, Hey, let’s walk up to that ridge!” We have science group meetings on Mars. It’s great.”

The Next Frontier

Krys is busy looking even farther in the future. The Europa Clipper mission has a critical gateway around the corner. Passing that will clear the path to actually start building the spacecraft.

“Before we can advance, we need to prove that we can operate this mission in the ways that we’ve said we want to operate it. Literally 80 percent of my time is spent in figuring out how we can prove this before the software is made, before the hardware is built, before the design of the hardware is even finalized.” 

“How will people, who are maybe in high school right now, run this mission?” she asks. “How will they get data back and analyze it? What will their expectations be? What will their needs be? What will their norms be? The answer is, I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”

Amanda Tuft is co-founder of The Creative Factor. She lives by the creative mantra can’t-not-do-the-thing and has the gift of seeing potential in, well, just about everything.