The Mechanical Artifact Ultra Space students at the Yale School of Architecture designed the Nomad Suit, a holistic and performative suit that questioned the lived experience of space through materiality, and movement. The suit considered the body's relationship to space, across time, dimension, and sensory feedback. Constructed from a layered system of dyneema fabric, woven cotton, found textiles, and a deconstructed dickies coverall jumpsuit, Nomad Suit, through its form and design, asks us to challenge the new in off-planet life and consider design for off-planet life through interconnected historical and poetic depictions of the universe through literature, science-fiction, and artifacts.
Nomad Suit features an amulet that can only be opened in a zero-g environment, showing memories, an inflatable sensory sleeve for proprioceptive communication between two humans, an analog telescopic puller to activate the movement of the layering of the suit, and a moss-clad silicon headpiece to provide a surface to connect the flyer to the earth through biological material. The suit as a whole embodied an inversion of the vacuum of space and extends a terrestrial aesthetic as conduit to how humans have been depicting the cosmos for thousands of years.