SOLACE

SOLACE investigates how pediatric inpatient rooms can actively contribute to healing by addressing one of recovery’s greatest barriers: stress. While health extends beyond the absence of illness to encompass physical, mental, and social wellbeing, contemporary hospital environments often prioritize clinical efficiency over psychological needs, inadvertently perpetuating stress. This becomes especially critical in pediatric care, where children are both recovering from illness and progressing through life’s essential developmental stages. 

Rooted in the Supportive Design Theory, SOLACE explores how autonomy, environmental control, and positive distraction can support emotional well-being and recovery. Through a hybrid deployable mechanism with integrated lighting, children and caregivers can adapt and zone the patient room through light, color, form, and interaction, fostering imagination, agency, and a
more responsive healing environment, offering affordances of control within an otherwise uncontrollable circumstance.