Sunday Business Post
Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun: A Spacewoman Came Travelling
by Leanna Byrne
HIGHLIGHT: Space conductor, scientist, experience-maker and more: Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun is so compelling they’ve created both a Barbie doll and a Lego figure in her image. Leanna Byrne spoke to her ahead of her Dublin visit, where she’ll be sharing her intergalactic ideas at The Future conference. Feeling inadequate? Good. Then let’s begin
Successful people will always get asked how they got to where they are. But in Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun’s case, the question is not only about the how, but the why.
Why, in 2012, did she assemble the International Space Orchestra (ISO), the world’s first orchestra of space scientists and astronauts from Nasa?
Why did she bring together designers, thinkers and entrepreneurs to launch the University of the Underground, a free MA programme for experiential design?
Why did she decide to produce a futuristic feature-length movie on the chain of command in place in the event of an asteroid hitting the Earth?
For Ben Hayoun, there is just one answer: to change the world.
“There is a need for decision-making creatives to be at the top level. I want to know that, in the next five years, I will have played a part in making the next president a creative, or someone in design or graphic art. I want to support that. Too often as creatives we think that our place in the world is not something we should play a part in. If we were playing a part, things would be a bit different,” she says.
Named by the commercial arts and design magazine Creative Review as one of the top 50 creative leaders driving change in the world at large in June, Ben Hayoun has a CV as impressive as it is diverse.
In 2014, Wired magazine awarded her with an Innovation Fellowship for her work and its ‘significant impact on the world’. The following year, she was nominated for a Women of the Year Achievement Award. She is designer of experiences at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, head of experiences at WeTransfer, a member of the Space Outreach and Education Committee at the International Astronautical Federation, a United Nations Adviser to the UN Virtual Reality labs, an advisory board member at the American Institute for Graphic Arts in Los Angeles and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Arts and the Architectural Association. And there’s lots more, certainly more than the space here will allow. She is – for the record – 32 years of age.
Too eclectic to be nailed down to one discipline, Ben Hayoun likes to strafe between film, design, music, semiotics, politics, digital and scientific practices.Somewhat ironically, the pressure to fit into a particular category has made her who she is today.
A space Barbie doll named after herself
Born in Valence in south-eastern France, Ben Hayoun was creative from a very young age. At secondary school, however, while preparing for her baccalauréat, she was compelled to choose between her love for creativity and her love for science.
“I chose science,” she tells me, “but I became friends with the tutors in fine art and started taking their classes. That’s where I started to see the possibilities of what the institution offered and, to some extent, that there was no limit.”
Graduating with a scientific Bac, Ben Hayoun toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor. She applied to study medicine, but also tried her hand at being accepted to one of four of Paris’s finest art schools.
On first attempt, she failed to make the cut. “These four schools were extremely competitive because there was just a few places. I applied for it straight after my Bac, but I didn’t get in. I thought: ‘That’s not right. This isn’t possible, I need to go in.’ So the year after, I applied, and I eventually got it,” she says.
Ben Hayoun trained in painting and later textile design at Olivier de Serres National College of Art and Design in Paris, before graduating from Design Interactions (MA) at the Royal College of Art. More recently, she was awarded a PhD in Human Geography and Political Philosophy from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Despite having a family history in the textiles industry, Ben Hayoun soon realised that she had not inherited her family’s skill. “My family came from Armenia, and they started in textiles like a lot of immigrants in the south of France. But I was crap at it. I was really bad,” she says.
Instead, she ended up doing a project on ceramics and, aged 19, spent time making kimonos in Japan. It took four years of picking fruit in the south of France to save up for the trip, she recalls.
In Japan, Ben Hayoun secured an internship with three brothers who were creating fashion designer Issey Miyake’s A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) collection, but only after she was asked to make chimneys out of cement for three months to prove her worth.
Indeed, she says that she has always been drawn to the unattainable.
“I’ve always wondered why I was so fascinated by space. Now I know that I am intrigued by places that are not welcome or that are not really open and are difficult to access. The more difficult it is to access, the more interesting it is to me,” she says.
“It took seven years for me to make it into Nasa. But by 2012, I made my way in there and eventually got into developing this project, which was the international space orchestra.”
Eventually, Ben Hayoun left Japan to enrol in the British Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions course.
Listening to a talk by the organisers of the course, one comment stuck: “People are not consumers or users, but they are complex human beings.”
“That just really hit me,” says Ben Hayoun.
By 2009, she had finished the course and founded Nelly Ben Hayoun Studio to focus on experience design.
Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun with musician Beck
Four years later, her recordings by the International Space Orchestra, entitled Ground Control: An Opera in Space, were released from the International Space Station. That same year, the International Space Orchestra feature film had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
In 2015, Ben Hayoun released her feature film Disaster Playground, a film based on an investigation of emergency procedures for disasters such as Earth-bound rogue asteroids. The film includes an original soundtrack featuring electronic music label Ed Banger Records and 1990s dance legends the Prodigy, as well as an orchestration by the International Space Orchestra.
Now she is working on her next big feature film, digital platform and exhibition entitled The Life, the Sea and the Space Viking.
Described as a “space odyssey and Viking saga 11km under the sea”, the film will document how minute life on Earth can inform colonisation across distant planets.
“It’s probably my biggest project, working with eight other scientists and looking for forms of life with the perspective that all we need to know about other space colonisation is actually here on Earth,” says Ben Hayoun.
Then there’s the University of the Underground, the free MA programme she launched earlier this year and which her studio manages.
Spread across two continents and a number of different countries and states, how does one person have enough time for all of this?
“I have doppelgängers,” she smiles. “Sometimes I don’t go to a place, but they go instead of me. It does work. People know that it’s Nelly 2.0 or 3.0, but my doppelgängers know what they have to say and go instead. There’s a lot to say about the expense of being physically somewhere, you know?”
Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun is one of a wide variety of speakers taking part in The Future conference at the RDS in Dublin from November 2-4. For more information, and to book tickets, see