It is actually rocket science: design at NASA’s JPL
Nestled in the hills just north of Los Angeles is a magical place. People of all ages and genders come together in a park-like setting to brainstorm and innovate while deer graze on the bushes a few feet away. An army of 700 interns fills the streets and hallways with energy and cheer every year. In this small city there is a lending library, three diners, three Starbucks(es?), a credit union, a rental car agency, and its very own police and fire departments.
This is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I’ve worked there for a little over five years now, and I can’t imagine ever leaving. In fact, if I ever get fired or laid off, they’ll have to drag me away. I’ll leave claw marks in the concrete.
This is the best job I’ve ever had. It’s also the hardest. I’m a 25 year veteran of a field of work that requires tough skin — I’m a UX designer. And yet, despite the thickness of my emotional armor, I’ve left the office in tears a few times. That said, every single morning I wake up excited to work, eager to continue chewing on the wicked problems and design of complex systems.
I mean, NASA’s saving the world. We’re understanding the origins of life, the origins of the solar system, the origins of the universe. We’re measuring the planet so we as a species can understand what’s happening with the climate, with the oceans, with our atmosphere. And we’re exploring other planets, to understand our own and also to make a new basket that someday, we’ll put some of our eggs in.
It’s hard to beat the WHY of what we do, you know?
But at JPL the challenges facing UX designers aren’t limited to defining tough problems and designing complex systems. Every problem at JPL is a socio-technical problem. And UX as a discipline is new to this 84 year old institution. There have only been UX folks here for seven years.
Take a minute to absorb that. These people have made everything that’s successfully landed on Mars. They made the only two spacecraft to ever leave our solar system. They made the robots that explore Jupiter and Saturn and the Pluto. All without UX people.
So you might not be surprised when I tell you that a huge part of every designer’s job at JPL is to explain to literal rocket scientists why there’s a designer involved in the project or mission, and how to work with us. Repeatedly.
My jujitsu sensei once told me, “Teaching is explaining the same thing 50 different ways until you find the one that sticks.” It’s kinda like that.
Luckily, JPL is a science organization. So everyone here is an empiricist. If you can convince people to give you a chance, good UX proves itself quick. And then, the next time you work with that individual person you don’t have to explain why you’re there — just how to work with you.
In addition, JPL is a .gov. This means that we account for our time in a way that means every single hour of our 40+ hour weeks is “billed” to projects. Government accountability and all. Although we are all in-house designers, we are assigned to projects and we bill those projects for our time just like an agency designer would. On top of that, most of the designers at JPL are on multiple projects — which can be ok, and can also be incredibly draining. We use some of the same techniques for time management that I used when I was an agency designer.
In addition to the challenge of organizational change management and personal time and project management, most of the problems we work on are wicked hard. Sure, there are sometimes wonderfully simple ones like “Make a dashboard for this telemetry” or “Help us with overflight selection” but even those straightforward projects involve hidden complexity and — I hate to say it — sometimes political issues that need to be understood and managed.
And then there are the timelines. We’re making a lot of headway on changing this, but some projects just have a 5 year timeline and there’s not a lot you can do about it. In Silicon Valley, I was accustomed to having an idea on Sunday, starting to build it Monday, and having it live on Friday. I could A/B test it over the weekend and reach statistical significance by the time I was back in the office on Monday. None of that will ever happen at JPL.
We have to be careful with taxpayer money, which is the right thing to do. So no one will ever have their idea built without careful analysis first. That analysis alone — to get permission and funding to build your idea — can take six months to a couple of years. Then, the building usually takes so much longer, in part because there’s so much complexity and in part because unless it’s a standalone system, we exponentially increase complexity with every system we connect to. And last, I have yet to reach statistical significance in my five years at JPL. We just don’t have a big enough n.
On the Deep Space Network, there are 60 operators (those are my users) in the world. No one else in the world can even begin to test as a proxy, because the DSN Operator is a super-expert with years of training and technical background. On Europa Clipper, there will be maybe 100 users of the ground data systems (that’s how we control the spacecraft and get science data back) — once it launches in 3–4 years.
I knew on my first day at JPL that it would be my last job, if I had anything to say about it. I worked for 20 years before I got here, and I’ve got 23 years till retirement, so if I think about my ultimate 28 year career at JPL a 5 year project isn’t that daunting. However, some of the designers who have a couple of years experience when they join us are looking at waiting twice the duration of their entire career so far to see their project go live, and it can be discouraging. We try really hard to celebrate the little wins around here, and remember that ultimately we are contributing something to the entirety of all mankind.
In telling you what it’s like to be a designer at JPL so far, I’ve talked about what’s hard. I think it’s important to understand all of a thing and embrace the challenges as well as the opportunities. Because in the end, the benefits of being a designer in this environment far outweigh the difficulties.
Growing up in a small town, I was often the smartest kid in my class. I started out as a nerd and despite a few years where I worked really hard to hide it, I’ve always been one. In Silicon Valley I loved the work I did, and a couple of times I made close friendships at work. At JPL, however, everything changed.
I’m no longer the smartest person in the room. In fact, I’m often the dumbest, and I can’t tell you how amazing that is. Frequently I’ll be in a meeting with 20 or so PhDs and I’ll be the only one without an aerospace or science background. Not only does this mean I get to learn stuff every single day, it also means that I have the freedom to ask all the noob questions that are critical to making a system usable. While some system engineers find this annoying, the majority realize that it makes them see their system with beginner’s mind, and they enjoy it.
I’m also not the only nerd anymore. We have a Slack channel for my favorite show, The Expanse. People wear Star Trek T-shirts to work. At JPL everyone is free to let their freak flag fly. It doesn’t hold them back or make them less promotable, as it most definitely did in Silicon Valley. I have met unicyclists, glass blowers, mycologists — so much so that one of my favorite things to do when I meet a new JPLer is ask them what their unique creative hobby is. They usually say they don’t have one, then talk to me about the time they summited Everest.
Because there are a lot of lifers at JPL, there’s also a family sort of culture. In Silicon Valley if I didn’t get along with someone I could outwait them — either they’d be gone in a year or two or I would. At JPL, I know dozens of people who have been here for 30 or 40 plus years. When you are going to work with a person for that long, you build a different kind of relationship. I am fortunate to have built deep friendships with a bunch of my colleagues. We’ll be working together for nearly 30 years, after all.
Tantamount, though, is the work. Perhaps I should capitalize it, because I never stop thinking about it. It’s part of my blood and soul. We’re making SPACE STUFF. On the Deep Space Network, I’m working with people who move ten million pound antennas to point at a moving object orbiting another moving object millions (billions in the case of Voyagers) of kilometers away and send and receive all the pictures and science data. Without these guys, we don’t have those gorgeous pictures of Jupiter and Saturn. We don’t have the heart on Pluto’s belly. Without the DSN, we don’t know that the moon Europa has water under its ice — twice the amount of water as on Earth.
Europa Clipper will go orbit that moon, map its surface, and understand the chemical composition. It might even fly through a plume of water, shooting kilometers off the surface like Space Old Faithful. I’m working to help the team figure out how to operate that mission, when the spacecraft is 45 minutes away from any signal we could send it. I’m working to help them understand how to get science data back from a spacecraft whose usability is limited by the fact that it has to have specially radiation-hardened equipment — because Jupiter is a radiation factory that will cook our little robot if we don’t shield her.
I have colleagues who work on an earth science project measuring ocean salinity, and other colleagues who work on a project measuring how fast the ice caps are melting. These people are making visualizations to win the hearts of a skeptical public and literally save the world. No, they’re not single-handedly fixing global warming, but that doesn’t happen in real life. In real life, these big problems are solved by thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people all doing their small part.
Every day, I go to work and I get to collaborate with some of the best designers on the planet, and some of the smartest scientists in the world, and engineers who do five impossible things before breakfast. We’re serving humanity, each of us a small cog in a big machine of Making Life Better For Everyone.
You can’t beat that.
