talk to an astronaut using friends in space by accurat

talk to an astronaut using friends in space by accurat

the friends in space web app by italian design studio accurat allows you to communicate with the italian astronaut samantha cristoforetti with the click of a mouse. friends in space also lets you track her past, current, and future orbits and displays her log of activities.

the core idea of the project is very simple: you log in with your social profiles (twitter, facebook, google+) and you can see samantha’s real-time position above your head, as well as a map of all the people around the world that are online on the platform in that moment.

log in with your social profiles (twitter, facebook, google+) and you can see samantha’s real-time position above your head

through a simple digital gesture you can send your ‘hello’ to sam and to all your new star-gazing friends. you will also see and receive a feedback when she says ‘hello’ to all the people below her, using twitter directly from the ISS.

during its first 3 weeks of life, friends in space already hosted over 2 millions of interactions .

the app displays a log of smantha’s activities

the project was born when the co-founder of accurat, giorgia lupi began talking to samantha cristoforetti on twitter, with the astronaut wanting to doing something that documented her space mission in an interactive way that ‘wasn’t scientific’. giorgia lupi told designboom more about the project…

designboom: what were some of the objectives you set yourself at the start of the project?

giorgia lupi: we wanted to speak to the audience of people that are fascinated by this topic and by space, and we really believe that design can have a central role in that; triggering the intangible emotions that matters most to users.

so, we decided to go for the authentic simplicity of the gesture of waiving and just saying hello – instead of a complex messaging systems – and leaving the actual conversations up to users’ twitter profiles; and building the ‘social part’ around this idea of being part of this map of the world that every time connects different people.

we love the idea of bringing ‘a little moment of joy’ to people that see themselves on the map and recognize them on the screen merging this digital distance – and connecting the ‘physical’ with the digital and also connecting them (i.e.their location) with samantha – and with others that are feeling the same emotions…

view your own timeline and interactions with fellow stargazers

DB: please could you tell us about the design process and final interface?

GL: we put a lot of effort in little details…designing the ‘aggregated users’ as those little ‘planets’ – so you become an ‘entity’ when you are aggregated with other people looking at the stars from approximately your location: the feedbacks for the hellos with the animation that resonate and reverberate …the actual arc that connects an instantly temporal hello.

we hope this could be a powerful visual storytelling that can enhance users to stay on the application and to come back.

we also think that the little process of learning how to use it is part of the experience: we don’t believe that innovative things have to be 100% intuitive; they have to be pleasant in the process of discovering how to use them and then being very simple.

view future and past data of samantha’s mission

friends in space will be online until the end of may 2015