Biotechnosphere Bathroom

Overview

With hopes that the future of mankind will live in greater integration in the natural world and coexistence with its creatures, our team used this foresight to create a space that exercises telepresence in both the natural world and our own. We decided to foster our own space of integration, using fish as models to better envision the mutualistic interactions we foresaw between creatures of the natural world and humans.

The Bathroom is a bathroom in which a fish tank houses its own fish-scaled replica of our human-scaled bathroom. In The Bathroom, the usual consequence of a person’s action is amplified by one that affects the fish’s world and vice versa. Brightness tracking and basic circuitry were employed to facilitate these interactions. Interactions included:

• a knock on the fish’s tank produced an echo of a knock in the human bathroom.

• a fish entering their own bathroom turned on the lights of the human bathroom

• a human sitting on their toilet caused bubbles to emerge from the fish's toilet

Process:

The Final Space

Interaction 1:

The tank’s front pane is connected to a knock sensor that triggers an echo of a knock to sound from an outside speaker if a visitor taps on its glass.

Interaction 2:

Blob tracking of the fish signals an arduino to turn on the bathroom lights if it enters the bathroom side of its tank

Interaction 3:

As visitors take a seat on the life-sized toilet, pressure sensors underneath the seat signal the solenoid to uncover an air pump connected to a tube within the fish-sized toilet. From there, air is pumped to the tube and creates emerging bubbles.