Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Many people believe that ‘purpose-built’ facilities will diminish some of the challenging behaviours exhibited by older people with dementia or psychiatric conditions. This study aimed to explore and understand what hands-on nurses in psychogeriatric assessment units experience and think of the built environment as a part of their day to day work. Twenty-one unstructured interviews were conducted with nurses at three psychogeriatric assessment units. The units ranged in style from an ancient adapted building to a contemporary 'purpose-built' facility. A critical hermeneutics derived from Gadamer was used to explore the interviews. It found that nurses think of the built environment in relation to the care needs of their patients, and feel bureaucratic restrictions in using the built environment more keenly than the shortcomings of the built environment itself. Nurses saw themselves and their patients as 'outcasts' or victims of those with money and power. The study concludes with suggestions for challenging the status quo, but also considers that being regarded as 'outcasts' allows opportunities to avoid being overly impressed by technological marvels.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Many people believe that ‘purpose-built’ facilities will diminish some of the challenging behaviours exhibited by older people with dementia or psychiatric conditions. This study aimed to explore and understand what hands-on nurses in psychogeriatric assessment units experience and think of the built environment as a part of their day to day work. Twenty-one unstructured interviews were conducted with nurses at three psychogeriatric assessment units. The units ranged in style from an ancient adapted building to a contemporary 'purpose-built' facility. A critical hermeneutics derived from Gadamer was used to explore the interviews. It found that nurses think of the built environment in relation to the care needs of their patients, and feel bureaucratic restrictions in using the built environment more keenly than the shortcomings of the built environment itself. Nurses saw themselves and their patients as 'outcasts' or victims of those with money and power. The study concludes with suggestions for challenging the status quo, but also considers that being regarded as 'outcasts' allows opportunities to avoid being overly impressed by technological marvels.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Computer Science / William H. Hsu / The contribution of the proposed dissertation is the application of affective intelligence in human-developed spaces where people live, work, and recreate daily, also known as built environments. Built environments have been known to influence and impact individual affective responses. The implications of built environments on human well-being and mental health necessitate the need to develop new metrics to measure and detect how humans respond subjectively in built environments. Detection of arousal in built environments given biometric data and environmental characteristics via a machine learning-centric approach provides a novel and new capability to measure human responses to built environments. Work was also conducted on experimental design methodologies for multiple sensor fusion and detection of affect in built environments. These contributions include exploring new methodologies in applying supervised machine learning algorithms, such as logistic regression, random forests, and artificial neural networks, in the detection of arousal in built environments. Results have shown a machine learning approach can not only be used to detect arousal in built environments but also for the construction of novel explanatory models of the data.

Smart homes, equipped with sensing, actuation, communication, and computation capabilities, enable automation and adaptation according to the occupants' needs. These capabilities work together to build holistic spatial and living experiences for the occupants. Smart technologies significantly impact spatial experiences, making smart home design an architectural problem along with a technological problem. Nevertheless, smart home research focuses primarily on standalone technological solutions, where the spatial/architectural aspect is largely absent. We argue that addressing the technological aspects isolated from the spatial context leads to reduced experiences for the users/occupants, as this practice blocks the pathways to develop holistic and innovative smart home solutions. Hence, we focus on bridging the gap between architectural and technological components in smart home research. To this end, we studied the design of smart homes from related disciplines, i.e., architecture, human-computer interaction, human--building interaction, industrial manufacturing, and modular assembly. Our research used the triangulation technique to consult with subject matter experts (researchers, practitioners, and professors of related disciplines) to understand current design processes. We conducted ethnographic studies, focus group studies, and in-depth interviews and identified challenges and best practices for smart home design process. Our investigation recognizes a nascent research problem where the technological and architectural aspects come together in the design thinking of smart home designers. We expanded the scope of design thinking to include three primary elements of smart homes- embedded technology, architectural elements, and occupants' needs. This multidisciplinary and complex process requires a well-defined design framework to methodically address all the issues associated with it. Hence, we developed a user-centered design framework, ArTSE, through an iterative Delphi study to guide the smart home design process. ArTSE stands for "Architecture and Technology in Smart Home DEsign". This framework guides user requirements collection using HCI models, technology decision making, interaction modalities selection, the decision support system for schematic design, technology infrastructure development, and production of the necessary documentation. This framework is an evolution of the normative theory in the architectural design process that caters to the needs of smart home design. For defining implementation strategies, we applied the framework to a case study-- a smart reconfigurable space design project. Overall, we document different aspects of the smart home design process and provide a comprehensive guideline for designers, researchers, and practitioners in this area. / Doctor of Philosophy / Smart homes have automation systems so that occupants can monitor and control lighting, heating, electronic devices, etc. remotely using phones/computers. Smart home devices and components are equipped with sensing, actuation, communication, and computation capabilities, to enable automation and adaptation according to the occupants' needs. These capabilities work together to build holistic spatial and living experiences for the occupants. Smart technologies significantly impact spatial experiences, making smart home design an architectural problem along with a technological problem. Nevertheless, smart home research focuses primarily on standalone technological solutions, where the spatial/architectural aspect is largely absent. We argue that addressing the technological aspects isolated from the spatial context leads to reduced experiences for the occupants, as this practice blocks the pathways to develop innovative smart home solutions. Hence, we focus on bridging the gap between architectural and technological components in smart home research. To this end, we studied the design of smart homes from related disciplines, i.e., architecture, human-computer interaction, human--building interaction, industrial manufacturing, and modular construction. We consulted with subject matter experts (researchers, practitioners, and professors of related disciplines) to understand current design processes. We conducted ethnographic studies, focus group studies, and in-depth interviews and identified challenges and best practices for smart home design process. Our investigation recognizes a nascent research problem where the technological and architectural aspects come together in the design thinking of smart home designers. We expanded the scope of design thinking to include three primary elements of smart homes- embedded technology, architectural elements, and occupants' needs. This multidisciplinary and complex process requires a well-defined design framework to methodically address all the issues associated with it. Hence, we developed a user-centered design framework, ArTSE, through an iterative procedure to guide the smart home design process. ArTSE stands for "Architecture and Technology in Smart Home DEsign". This framework guides user requirements collection using HCI models, technology decision making, interaction modalities selection, the decision support system for schematic design, technology infrastructure development, and production of the necessary documentation. For defining implementation strategies, we applied the framework to a case study-- a smart reconfigurable space design project. Overall, we document different aspects of the smart home design process and provide a comprehensive guideline for designers, researchers, and practitioners in this area.

"Passage" presents a negotiation between the natural and the human-made realms and comments on the duality of perceptions and emotional responses associated with each. On the one hand, I aim to create a calm, quiet and peaceful environment offering a pleasant and meditative experience.  On the other hand, I offer the challenge of contemplation in a city-like space that evokes dense urban architecture in the process of decay. Both experiences draw on my personal histories of fact and fiction, reality and dream, hopefully resulting in evocative parallel experiences for those who encounter my exhibition space.

Urban exploration is a practice of researching, discovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas within built environments. Through charting the rise to prominence of a London urban exploration crew between 2008 and 2011, of which I became an active member, I posit that urban explorers are one of many groups reacting to increased surveillance and control over urban space by undertaking embodied urban interventions in the city that undermine clean spatio/temporal narratives. The primary research questions stem from my attempts to interrogate the practice from the inside out: Who are urban explorers? What does it involve? Why do they do it? What do they think they will accomplish? While the thesis focuses primarily on 220 explorations undertaken with my primary ethnographic group in London between 2008 and 2011, it also speaks to the urban exploration "scene" that has developed over the past twenty years in cities all over the world. The results that emerge from the research both compliment and complicate recent work within geography around issues of surveillance, resistance, hacking and urban community building and lays out a new account, never before outline in such detail, of the tales of urban exploration taking place in temporary cities across the globe. This visual ethnography is comprised of text (75,000 words), photographs (200) and video (10 shorts). the ethnographic video components can be found on the Place Hacking video channel located at http://vimeo.com/channels/placehacking . I suggest watching all 10 short videos before reading this thesis.

"Passage" presents a negotiation between the natural and the human-made realms and comments on the duality of perceptions and emotional responses associated with each. On the one hand, I aim to create a calm, quiet and peaceful environment offering a pleasant and meditative experience.  On the other hand, I offer the challenge of contemplation in a city-like space that evokes dense urban architecture in the process of decay. Both experiences draw on my personal histories of fact and fiction, reality and dream, hopefully resulting in evocative parallel experiences for those who encounter my exhibition space.

This dissertation explores the origins and development of Northern Iroquoian village life in present-day southern Ontario, from the first appearance of durable domestic architecture in the 10th century A.D., to the formation of large villages and towns in the 15th century A.D. Twenty-five extensively excavated village sites are analyzed in terms of the configuration of exterior and interior space, with a view to placing the social construction of community at the centre of the problem of early village development. Metric and space-syntax measures of the configuration of outdoor space reveal coordinated developments in the scale of houses and villages, their built-densities, and the structure of exterior accessibility networks, that involved the emergence of a “local-to-global” pattern of order with village growth. Such a pattern, I argue, was experientially consonant with a sequential hierarchy of daily social encounters and interactions that was related to the development of factional groups. Within the longhouse, a similarly “nested” pattern of spatial order and associated social identities emerged early in the history of village development, but was elaborated and ritualized during the later 13th century as the longhouse became the primary body through which political alliances involving village coalescence were negotiated. I suggest that the progressive extensification of collective social groups associated with longhouse expansions and village coalescences involved the development of “conjoint” personhood and power in a context of predominantly mutualistic village economies and enduring egalitarian ideals. The ritualization of domestic space during this process reveals that the continual production and extension of social group identities – such as the matrilineage – was contingent upon “social work” accomplished through an ongoing generative engagement with the built environment.

This dissertation explores the origins and development of Northern Iroquoian village life in present-day southern Ontario, from the first appearance of durable domestic architecture in the 10th century A.D., to the formation of large villages and towns in the 15th century A.D. Twenty-five extensively excavated village sites are analyzed in terms of the configuration of exterior and interior space, with a view to placing the social construction of community at the centre of the problem of early village development. Metric and space-syntax measures of the configuration of outdoor space reveal coordinated developments in the scale of houses and villages, their built-densities, and the structure of exterior accessibility networks, that involved the emergence of a “local-to-global” pattern of order with village growth. Such a pattern, I argue, was experientially consonant with a sequential hierarchy of daily social encounters and interactions that was related to the development of factional groups. Within the longhouse, a similarly “nested” pattern of spatial order and associated social identities emerged early in the history of village development, but was elaborated and ritualized during the later 13th century as the longhouse became the primary body through which political alliances involving village coalescence were negotiated. I suggest that the progressive extensification of collective social groups associated with longhouse expansions and village coalescences involved the development of “conjoint” personhood and power in a context of predominantly mutualistic village economies and enduring egalitarian ideals. The ritualization of domestic space during this process reveals that the continual production and extension of social group identities – such as the matrilineage – was contingent upon “social work” accomplished through an ongoing generative engagement with the built environment.

"Passage" presents a negotiation between the natural and the human-made realms and comments on the duality of perceptions and emotional responses associated with each. On the one hand, I aim to create a calm, quiet and peaceful environment offering a pleasant and meditative experience.  On the other hand, I offer the challenge of contemplation in a city-like space that evokes dense urban architecture in the process of decay. Both experiences draw on my personal histories of fact and fiction, reality and dream, hopefully resulting in evocative parallel experiences for those who encounter my exhibition space.