That Hospital Room

We are producing a fully automated bubble-blowing device called “That Hospital Room.” When a visitor places a treasured letter, photo, or drawing into the device, an entire portable care-use toilet is submerged in bubble solution; the memory is projected onto the film stretched across the toilet seat's opening, and blown by the wind into bubbles that drift into the sky and vanish. The pain of caregiving, of fighting illness, of isolation — each is different, and can't be spoken of as one and the same. But in front of this device, whether someone's pain is great or small, they can share the same place. The prototype is being developed in collaboration with Sotaro Yokoi, an engineer and first-year doctoral student at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, and Alex Olszewski, an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo's Tsukada Lab, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology.