Undertaken at a time when sweeping changes to state funding for higher education in general and the incorporation of art schools into larger higher education institutions in particular, has radically changed the role of the art school in the UK, this thesis engages a range of artistic research practices to explore, contextualize and debate the role of the built environment of the art school (and related cultural spaces) as a dynamic site of social interaction out of which artistic research practices have developed as strategies for producing both knowledge of a space and knowledge of how to understand the formation of that space, the seeing of it, listening to it and the processes through which we as students, lecturers, administrators , facilities staff, librarians, artists and researchers contribute to how such built spaces are produced and experienced over time. I make connections between local developments in the cultural politics of artist education in north London and concepts of authorship, experience and history in the context of a built space. By critically reflecting on a series of collectively produced artistic research works produced out of a specific art school site, the thesis reflects on the implications - intellectual, political, social - of placing historical, critical and theoretical studies in the art school and on the contemporaneous design of flexible multi - purposed and adaptive spaces such as the Phase II building in which much of this study is located. The art school is proposed as an active engine, an environment within which many participate in different ways at different times in a shared community of aesthetic, cultural and intellectual debate in and around which they negotiate their developing practices. Through a series of artistic research works, I argue that the experience of these spaces is comprehensible only at the point of encounter between artist, listener and work . The encounters presented here necessitate new and evolving social relations within the artistic research work and propose forms of resistance to dominant forms of subject formation within art school culture.

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The argument put forth in this thesis is based on the observation that contemporary design suffers from a ‘missing body.’ This absence stems from a Modernist aversion to the figure, which has been absorbed by contemporary design. It contributes to a diminished embodied imagination and a diminished ability to address a lived embodiment and situated subjectivity in architecture, particularly in representations and ornament. The notion of ‘body agents’— dynamic, subjective, and non-ideal figures that exist in a reciprocal state with designs— are put forward to address radically new conditions in architecture, subjectivity, and embodiment. These figures are also predicated on the importance of continuity with the past. The historical precedents that are particularly important to this thesis and inform this definition of body agents are the proto-Baroque work of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Baroque work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the more recent work of Walter Pichler which presciently evoked a technologically saturated embodiment. In these examples, figures enact the emotional and personal themes of their authors as well as broader cultural issues; they mediate between the architect and the design, but also between the inhabitant and the buildings within which they are embedded. This historical research was part of the process which also included narrative writing and the construction of hybridized images to create a cast of body agents which were deployed in design projects. The results were body agents with ‘expressive’ anatomies, comprised of reified digital meshworks that spatially and materially intertwined with their architectural contexts. My intention is to introduce body agents into contemporary design to catalyze architectural imagination and expose opportunities to interject situated and embodied intersubjectivities into design.

Every urban space has a unique aural signature and is part of a hierarchical meta-system of acoustic spaces. The aural signature is a result of the distribution of sonic events within a space that create an aggregate of acoustic spaces at different scales, ultimately creating a sound environment. Evidence suggests that fidelity of aural stimuli is a significant parameter in creating an accurate spatial mental map of the surrounding environment. The field that is concerned with the acoustic qualities of urban spaces is the interdisciplinary field of Soundscape. Soundscape, as a field and a term, was originally defined as a relationship between the human ear, sonic environment and society, and was intended to be an integral part of urban design. The concept is based on physical parameters as well as on the perceptual and cognitive restrictions. Until recently, the focus of the majority of soundscape design practice is the documentation and preservation of the urban sounds through audio recordings, and this has largely remained within the conceptual realm of music studios. As psychologists and acoustic engineers became more interested in soundscape research, the consideration of sound quality has gained traction. However, the analysis is heavily based on emotional response to soundscape audio tracks in laboratories. Urban spaces have long been designed primarily through three-dimensional geometrical procedures that are presented and evaluated visually. Although the field of soundscape was originally intended as a paradigm-shift for urban design, the sound phenomena have remained a secondary design aspect. The process of designing the aural spatial signature of urban open spaces has not yet been made readily accessible to the designer in modes that align with architectural design procedures. This is because spatial designers (architects, urban and event designers) lack adequate design concepts, metrics and tools to integrate acoustic sensory aspects into the design process of urban spaces. A relatively new adjunct theory was developed to relate sound (scape) to spatial design, namely Aural Architecture. There is another new epistemological field that addresses the spatiotemporal formation of sound domains, namely Soundscape Ecology. Although these theories offer spatial concepts, these intersecting theories have not yet been integrated into architectural and urban design practices. This research seeks to create a tool that integrates the theoretical spatial and soundscape design concepts, to aid spatial designers when considering sound as a design driver for urban design. The investigation is founded on establishing a relationship between aural architecture theories and the urban spatial experience and design. It also explores the merging of spatial and acoustical computational approaches, through integrating the physical/mathematical representation of sound to the mapping of the spatial envelopes and phenomena of human aural responses. The key design-based contribution is the development and calibration of a computational design and decision-aiding tool that can predict qualitative patterns of aural spatial perception, and translate them into spatial attributes within a modelled urban space. The fields of computation simulation, soundscape, and psychoacoustics inform the structure of the tool, the input parameters, and the testing and validation processes this research adopts. The merging of these concepts and processes are the knowledgebased contribution this research offers to the field of architecture.

There is a widely accepted but undocumented number of colloquial terms used within the architectural lighting profession, briefly described as ‘light effects’. They are seen as vague and unsuccessful in describing the phenomena in question. Therefore a thorough retrospection of classifications or explorations by lighting designers, researchers and artists such as Richard Kelly, John Flynn and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is carried out in search of understanding the underlying criteria. The hypothesis of the thesis is that designers perceive light effects and conceive lighting schemes as compositions of light effects during the design process, according to five generic principles of ‘space and light’. They are briefly described as: direction and position of light source, geometry of light distribution, illumination perspective, use of abstraction in luminous compositions and syntactic relationship of surface and source. In the second part, an empirical evaluation of the hypothesis is unfolded. Lighting designers are recorded while planning the lighting for a purpose-designed residence. With methods influenced by protocol analyses of design studies, the corpus of coded transcripts supported by produced sketches and videos is analysed in an interpretative approach. It appears that designers clearly consider the first three principles as directly affecting the formal properties of a lighting scheme while also thinking on a more organisational level of luminous compositions, which involves some use of abstract and a lesser use of syntactic thinking. The use of ‘metaphors’ and ‘archetypes’ is identified as an extra mental tool that interlinks the itemised light effects to an overall conception of space by providing ‘content’. Overall, the thesis attempts for the first time to accurately address the elusive nature of ‘light effects’ based on designers’ opinions and establishes five criteria that work as an articulation of architectural lighting design principles.

This research examines in detail the concept stage of architectural design, giving emphasis on the strategic behaviour in collaborative concept design activity, exploring how this can inform digital tools and workflows in the architectural digital prototyping process. To attain this, this research has been developed in four complementary stages: a survey investigating some aspects of common knowledge in design practice, an ethnography of design review meetings; experiments measuring specific aspects found in this ethnography; and finally an investigation of the findings as game theoretical model, proposing variations of strategic behaviour within this workflow. To start with, the survey was conducted to identify views on collaborative work. This informed an ethnography, using a series of video-reflection interviews of the documented social situations. This empirical data, including focus interview, eye tracking and qualitative questionnaires were then coded for semantic analyses to identify meaningful patterns of behaviour and a number of selected themes related to this value seeking behaviour, composing an ethnographic monograph. Focusing on one aspect of the ethnography, ‘the adaptive behaviour of designers’, two controlled experiments were conducted to observe the designers response to changes. For this, hardware and software were developed to register the interaction between designers. The data collected, including before and after questionnaires, were explored to give insights into how architects articulate knowledge to realise value in design. A series of game-theoretical models were developed as a unifying framework for these observations. They vary from simpler, strategic games with a conservative equilibrium, to extensive, incomplete and imperfect games. Although here the initial ambition was to test mechanism designs to yield desirable outcomes, the study is limited to modelling observations and reflecting on alternative design workflows. For the study conclusion, we reflect on these interaction models as a mechanism to promote cohesion on knowledge management in the production of building information models, whereby architects would be able to explore, retrieve and transform designs in an unobtrusive collaborative workflow by recycling assets in a non-destructive fashion. The scope of this research hopes to characterise negotiations and problematisation in the architectural design process, examining dynamics of decision making between architects unfolds to identify and create value in the early design process.

As a major contributor to the planetary greenhouse effect, construction industry needs to adopt sustainability at the core of its activities - to reverse or slow down the impacts of climate change. Increased collaboration among stakeholders along with analysis/performance based decision making is the way forward for enhanced sustainability. Emphasis is placed on the process of shared creation through multi-disciplinary collaboration, enabled by the implementation of IT (Information Technology) that acts as a platform to augment our ability to communicate. Developments in the Construction IT have been product oriented and aimed at solving particular domain problems usually with a narrow focus - further reducing the accessibility and interoperability of information over the lifecycle stages. Advances in the semantics based interoperable data standards, such as IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) offer significant advantage in removing such barriers to successful vertical and horizontal integration of software tools and process. The use of building simulation in architectural design requires specialist knowledge and a rich set of information about the proposed building which are not available to the design team at early stages. Standards based mapping of information for input processing of the simulation engines can act as an alternative to simplified tools supporting the exploratory nature of design. Detailed based input processing also restricts the use of simulation to occasional validation of solutions - even during detailed design stages. For a directed exploration of the solution space, numerical optimisation methods can be applied to enhance simulation assisted design. Successful application of optimisation methods pivots on the ability of the analysis and decision making components of the software to communicate with each other without the loss of data semantics. To realise this potential, a process-oriented integrated framework based on the interoperability of information and software tools have been developed and implemented in this thesis. For horizontal integration of domain specific tools through intra-software messaging, ardML - an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) based schema has been developed which attempts to connect non-interoperable software tools. Multi-disciplinary environmental design of buildings has been chosen as the domain of discourse. The framework currently employs industry standard zonal building simulation as an analysis tool and gradient-based mathematical optimisation methods for informed decision making. Interoperability among tools, processes and information has been achieved through the implementation of IFC based data model. The modular nature of the object-oriented framework allows incorporation of existing and future tools. The applicability of the framework has been investigated in the early stages of architectural design, in particular the selection of form and orientation - considering the environmental aspects. The implementation of the framework at an ambiguous and exploratory stage of design reinforces its applicability in a wider industry context.

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With this PhD thesis I explore the ways in which spatial literacies are manifested and negotiated in interaction between children and designers engaged in spatial design. I do so by describing the ways in which talk-in-interaction between children and spatial designers is accompanied by gestures and the use of artefacts. By extending the theory surrounding everyday literacies and multimodal language to the field of spatial design, I draw on a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework of ‘spatial literacies’ to understand the data through the lens of ‘reading and writing space’. I use this framework as a starting point as well as an analytical lens for exploring my research interests. Within the context of three live spatial design projects, this research draws on principles of Focused Ethnography to collect data in naturally occurring interaction (Knoblauch, 2005; Wall, 2014). The case study projects took place in 2014 in Germany, Slovenia and the UK, engaging children aged 6-10 years through various design methods (sketching, model-building, making videos) with the process of designing various spaces for children (a department store café area, primary school open spaces and a primary school playground). My role in the German and English case studies focuses on being a researcher, whereas in the Slovenian case study I adopt a dual role of a designer and researcher. A novel combination of Ethnography, Autoethnography (Ellis and Bochner, 2013, 1996; Geertz, 2000) and Conversation Analysis (Antaki, 2011a; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2007) is used to capture a unique portrayal of how two cultures – the culture of children and the culture of spatial designers – meet through the process of communication. Besides the methodological contribution to knowledge, this research adds an original contribution to the broader debate on how to support more effective communication in spatial design. Key findings show how spatial literacy can be a social, interactional and flexible process rather than an unchangeable skill that people ‘possess’. Throughout the three case studies, the designers were observed to use their talk, gestures and the use of artefacts to engage children in a creative exchange of interpreting space representations, while also expanding the children’s skills to ‘read and write space’. The designers created conditions for children to see and experience space in new ways through demonstrating the relevant skills for reading and writing space, required to express their spatial design ideas.

Exposure to sufficient light during the daytime is fundamental for the regulation of the sleep/wake cycle, with the blue part of the spectrum most influential. This thesis explores exposure to environmental blue light and level of illuminance in two populations that experience circadian disruption i.e. older people and young people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim was to examine associations between blue light exposure, illuminance level and sleep/wake and physical activity patterns. Firstly, an exploratory study was conducted in adolescents with ASD living in a residential school setting aged 13-17 years (n=8). Secondly, a cross-sectional study carried out in two seasons (summer and winter) with a comparative study between seasons of varying light exposure and sleep/wake and physical activity outcomes was conducted in older people aged 72-99 years (n=20). In both studies quantitative measures were used to examine personal light exposure and sleep/wake patterns by use of novel equipment known as an actiwatch. This research demonstrated that objective measures of sleep/wake and light monitoring could be successfully administered in two populations with complex sensory issues. Preliminary findings from the exploratory study in adolescents with ASD indicated that exposure to blue light prior to bedtime was associated with a delay in sleep onset. The methodology developed for participant recruitment and engagement in a study using body sensors proved to be successful. Results for the study in older people suggested that between seasons daytime physical activity, blue light exposure and illuminance levels were significantly higher in summer. Correlated component regression (CCR) was used to investigate predictors of sleep parameters, suggesting morning blue light exposure (a predictor of total night-time sleep), daytime activity level (a predictor of sleep efficiency) and visual function (a predictor of minutes awake during the night) may contribute to sleep quality. The findings from these studies suggested that light exposure and health outcomes, such as physical activity and visual function could be responsible for sleep quality. This has important implications for design and health interventions promoting health and wellbeing, i.e. morning light exposure and time outdoors are important for circadian entrainment and building design and routine should reflect a diurnal light pattern light.