This research aimed at understanding how occupants use energy in their homes to make themselves feel more comfortable. This was done to propose customized environmental characteristics that could improve the occupants’ comfort while reducing energy consumption. To conceptualize such bespoke environmental features, occupant archetypes were produced based on the occupants’ intentions and motivations behind comfort behaviours.

A mixed-methods human-centered design approach was developed for ...

This research introduces the concept of visibility as a useful tool to assess the democratic features of public spaces. It understands democratic public spaces as open spaces, which are accessible to all and allow different cultural expressions for individuals and groups. The concept of visibility refers to the visual perception of the observable features of distinctive urban groups in public space, which give evidence of how these groups engage with, shape, and construct public space. The re...

This thesis proposes a framework to address the design process in design education. Building upon the assumption that teachers, being professional designers, do not discuss the design process in the architectural design studio and do not have a vocabulary to do so, five generic elements or anchor points are defined which represent the basic design skills. The validity of the framework and the assumption is tested respectively in interviews with a variety of designers and in observations of di...

The housing stock in Vietnam has boomed in the last few decades, especially in urbanised areas. However, the increasing number of housing units did not go along with housing quality, a healthy living environment or a sustainable building stock. Recent legislation only applies to public buildings but not the private housing sector, which accounts for the majority of the building stock. Therefore, this research aimed to contribute to a more sustainable building stock in Vietnam by improving the...

Numerous actors have been involved in the planning of the port and city of Naples. National and local authorities—namely central government, the Region, the Municipality of Naples, and the Port Authority—act upon the port at different scales, according to diverging interest and by using different planning tools. Each entity has different spatial claims and contrastive views on what port city integration can be. Their diverse goals have led port and city to develop into separate entities, ...

Leftover spaces are neglected and obsolete spaces within the city. As they are temporarily unoccupied by defined urban functions, leftover spaces provide unique “interstitial conditions” that open for wild species as well as different informal social activities, offering crucial complements to the formal and defined urban spaces. In this context, the design of leftover spaces poses a paradox between the practice of design that projects a set of definitions onto the site, and the indeter...

Shell structures carry loads with their thin yet curved shapes. Being thin means shells require little material, which is desirable for minimizing embodied carbon footprints. However, the feature of being curved implies shells require immense effort to design and fabricate. To address the challenges, this dissertation consists of three parts: developing a design algorithm based on radial basis functions (RBFs), inventing a fabrication technique based on reconfigurable mechanisms, and producin...

Indoor navigation applications are actively investigated and developed due to their capacity to provide users with essential information in the modern extensive building complexes. Therefore, many researchers have developed a range of indoor navigation applications, which have focused on aspects such as localization, indoor route computation, and human spatial cognition. Unfortunately, current indoor navigation systems do not consider the user's access rights when it comes to navigating safel...