<p>This thesis project aims to create an animistic system for remote workers to promote a healthier work style and more interactions between remote workers and their colleagues. The Covid-19 pandemic since 2020 resulted in a significant increase in employees who started to work remotely, and with that came the benefits and challenges. Working from home allows remote workers to work with higher productivity and a more flexible schedule and improves the work and life balance of the remote workers. However, major communication issues were reported due to asynchronous working pace and less in-person interaction, which became a significant challenge for remote working. Other remote working challenges include difficulties setting up a home office, health concerns such as sedentariness and hydropenia, higher worker self-discipline requirements, etc. In this thesis, I took the approach of animistic design, focused on the context of a home office environment, and created an interactive system, Planto, a planter and mobile application system designed to improve the work-from-home experience. This thesis presents the Planto system’s research and design process, including literature review, peer product review, user research, ideation, the iterative process of a mobile application design and a product design, and a heuristic evaluation to assess the quality of the design outcome. Planto system seamlessly integrates product design, animistic design, and IoT design. More importantly, it aims to facilitate the complicated work-from-home experience, and the medium is a simple planter.</p>

<p>This dissertation focuses on the creation of a paradigm shift in building innovation. Challenges in achieving building energy-efficiency at scale highlight the complexity of the building performance problem, which is embedded with social, cultural, physical, environmental, and economic factors. Traditional approaches to building design have difficulty accounting for these multi-faceted variables and related longitudinal barriers and intangible impacts. Firstly, key stakeholders and their economic constraints change throughout time, and this variability is not traditionally considered upfront or addressed throughout a building’s operation. Secondly, buildings have social, cultural, environmental and economic implications that are difficult to quantify and evaluate against strictly functional design objectives. Therefore, current deeply technical and often system-specific building design strategies could benefit from whole-building solutions that account for this complexity and enable a paradigm shift in design toward human-centered outcomes (i.e., well-being, health, financial sustainability) and effective (i.e., equitable and sustainable) buildings. </p> <p>To drive this shift, an impact-based innovation framework was employed to pursue system-level and ecosystem-level strategies to optimize longitudinal building value assessment and distribution. First, a grounded theory study was pursued which identified gaps in current design practice that miss underlying building subsystem interactions which influence building performance. A system-level taxonomy of the building was then defined, linking identified sub-system synergies to functional, emotional and social building benefits for inhabitants. Then, an exploratory mixed-methods study was pursued, yielding a longitudinal building value framework that helps characterize key stakeholders, building design choices, and shared efficacy metrics. Building on these inputs, a multi-stakeholder, longitudinal building value assessment model was developed. The model was tested on two residential building development scenarios, highlighting its ability to capture the true impact of buildings on affected stakeholders over time in terms of tangible and intangible building costs and benefits. Finally, business model innovation concepts were employed to identify specific changes in stakeholder value delivery and capture strategies that could redistribute building costs and benefits over time, and thereby facilitate a shift in the paradigm of design and value capture in the residential building industry. </p>