MASTABA: The Household Shrine in The Future Archived Digital Pictures
Daisuke Uriu∗
KEIO MEDIA DESIGN

1Takahiro Ogasawara†
KEIO MEDIA DESIGN

Designing Future Family Shrines

Recently, the styles of gravestones in Japan are changing. For example, someone made a sculpture of piano, which was his hobby,
as his grave.[ZENYUSEKI ] In another case, someone made a compact plate made of remains of the deceased, instead of making hisgrave.
These phenomenons show that the meaning of a grave in Japan ischanging. The traditional Japanese graves have been eternal places
where ancestors sleep. Some modern Japanese graves are the thingsor places for their family and posterity to remember and hand down
the memory of ancestors. These show, today, that many Japanesepeople think that archiving dead’s memories is more important thanthe place where dead lies itself. And we think that these modern
graves should be called ”family shrines”.
We designed MASTABA as the future family shrine. We supposethat the future family shrine will be consist of digital memories ofancestors with a wooden physical structure. Digital memories areeternal, but a physical shape of MASTABA is not eternal.

2MASTABAMASTABA is a household shrine in the future where families including some generations hands down their memories through digital pictures. In MASTABA user can see the pictures when they
were at the same age side by side. And user can select the age
when the picture was taken, with lighting the caracole consists of
100 steps indicating age 0 to 99 years.
In MASTABA user can remember the life of human, by the ages as
the average scale, including the memories in usual day in addition tosignificant memories in life. ”I Photograph to Remember” [Meyer1994] is a prior work about human memories including whole lifeand death with using digital pictures. But, user can see this work in
his PC only. And so, It is not suitable for many people to experience
this work at a time. While MASTABA was designed as the placethat family use and experience daily, not to be stashed on a shelf.

Naohito Shimizu‡
KEIO MEDIA DESIGN

3Naohito Okude§
KEIO MEDIA DESIGN

Design and Structure

MASTABA is the building of the shape of octagon prism whose
diameter of about 3m, and a height of about 2m. It is surroundedby the spiral stairway consists of each 100 steps of cube 10cm on aside. Each steps have compartments incorporating CDS light sensors with doors. Each doors are printed 0 to 99 numbers and indicate the age of human. User takes a light in the door and can see
appropriate pictures taken at the selected age.
At a floor in MASTABA, there is a table on which shows the pictures by the projector set on a ceiling. RFID antenna is mountedwith its tabletop and a rotary board is set in the table. User puts acup including RFID tag on the table and MASTABA can identify
whose cup is here. And the user can change and see a number ofpictures with turning the rotary board.
The software operating MASTABA administrates the digital pictures with the shooting date, the owner of picture and the birth dateof users. It calls the picture from a file server and shows them withreferencing to the shooting date from stairway, the user informationfrom the tabletop and the information of changing the pictures by
the rotary board.

4VisionWe wish families over the world hand down to their posterity thememory of their days of life, and recollect memory of them eachother on a daily basis. Now we can only commit our ancestors
at most three or four generations ago. Today, our memory canbe saved semipermanently because we can record something bydigital. And also MASTABA is a digital medium. So, Even if
MASTABA will decay and be rebuilt over and over, the memories
saved in the digital photographs will not deteriorate and will behanded down forever.
Moreover, we think MASTABA will be received by people over
the world. It is very difficult to create a shrine suitable for everybody in the world, because there are a lot of people with difference
races, cultural backgrounds or religion etc. But MASTABA is designed for families. Nobody does not have family and hand down
to posterity his or his family’s memories. We wish that MASTABA
spread around the world and keep the memories of you and yourfamilies forever.

5

Acknowledgment

This project is partially granted by CREST, JST.

Figure 1: Appearance of MASTABA∗ e-mail: uriu@sfc.keio.ac.jp† e-mail: s03246to@sfc.keio.ac.jp‡ e-mail: t03512ns@sfc.keio.ac.jp§ e-mail: okude@sfc.keio.ac.jp

References
ZENYUSEKI. http://www.zenyuseki.or.jp/.
M EYER , P., 1994. I Photograph to Remember. Voyager Co.
http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/fotografio/.