[Abstract]: This dissertation addresses several highly-critical issues in affective computing and agent architecture design including knowledge representation, motivation, emotion appraisal and affective decision making. The approach presented integrates motivational drives, goals and associated behaviours via a multi-dimensional Affective Space. The research focuses on an emotionally motivated artificial intelligence (EMAI) architecture. This architecture dispenses with the ideas implemented in contemporary affective agent architectures where individual emotional states are modelled as individual variables, integrated and processed using complex algorithms. Contemporary approaches required significant programming effort to modify them for domains outside their realm, integration of new emotional states and high-level complex affective decision making. Unlike contemporary affective agent architectures, the EMAI architecture reasons using a multi-dimensional decision making process where emotional states are modelled as coexisting locations in a six-dimensional affective continuum called the Affective Space. Through use of the Affective Space, an EMAI agent can predict the effect that certain behaviours will have on its emotional state and in turn decide how to behave. Furthermore, the agent can use the emotions produced from its behaviour to update its beliefs about particular events and entities. The nature of the Affective Space also allows an EMAI agent to deal with processes related to emotion synthesis in a more effective manner than contemporary architectures. These processes include the natural diminishing of an emotional state's strength over time, the way in which emotions can influence an agent's perspective of a situation and the way in which an agent can migrate from one emotional state to another. This dissertation contributes crucial and unique concepts and formalisations of emotion based intelligence for agent construction to the domain of Artificial Intelligence (in particular Affective Computing). It introduces a unique process for emotionally motivated decision making based on holistic and atomic appraisals made with respect to events. The thesis contained within has been supported through experimentation that has confirmed the effectiveness of the emotion synthesis technique in the EMAI architecture and how this is used to produce intelligent agents capable of emotional reasoning and decision making.

Infrastructure continues to perpetuate the effects of splintering urbanism in South African cities. Where apartheid planning policies such as the group areas act used infrastructure as a mechanism of social organisation, this design dissertation proposes using architecture as social infrastructure to transcend these sociotechnical divides. The concept of the sociotechnical denotes the synergy of a city's infrastructural systems and its social life. In this design dissertation this idea is explored at various scales: at the urban level, through a development strategy that spatialises unsafe public open land; at the architectural scale, through surface articulation and interfacing with urban infrastructure; and at the technical level, through building performance analysis and technical design development in support of architectural goals. The project uses a distributed programme that stretches across communities in order to socialise the existing urban infrastructure of a pedestrian bridge. By leveraging the social significance of a local football club, the project proposes a social programme around the idea of a football clubhouse as a programmatic anchor. In reacting to urban infrastructure, the idea of imageability and presence are important considerations. These concepts enable youth to positively engage with the architecture, and allows the building to convey its purpose and programmatic intent, thereby creating a strong social interface with its users. Sociotechnical architecture is considered as an urban armature that socialises and spatialises urban infrastructure. The architecture therefore seeks the minimal amount of fixity to support a variety of flexible events surrounding sports and recreation activities. This is achieved through a selection of robust materials used in horizontal surfaces of social purpose, and the combination of structure, materiality and geometry to create a series of vertical surfaces of social presence and architectural imageability. The result is a strategic arrangement of architectural interventions deployed across a large urban scheme. By distributing the architecture across urban infrastructure, the project connects two communities and presents an architectural response to splintering urbanism.

This thesis creates a complementarity relationship with the use of timber and concrete as primary structural and accent materials. Key elements of this thesis include (1) The development of a wood latticing system (2) Stairs that posses a strong sculptural language (3) The Lantern, a free standing lobby/box office, clad in wood and glass (4) Circulation towers that accommodate balcony seating. Studies of these elements went through many iterations resulting in over one hundred drawings. Progression of these drawings are directed to the interpretation of building form and the interaction with the site. These concepts are then implemented in the design of a multifaceted music venue located on a hillside in the New River Valley. Minutes from the college town of Blacksburg, Virginia this event complex caters to an array of musical functions. Spaces include The Lantern, which is a multipurpose lobby/lounge, the main auditorium, and an outdoor amphitheater. / Master of Architecture

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This thesis evolves perception as a hypothesis to reframe architectural praxis negotiated through agent-situation interaction. The research questions the geometric principles of architectural ordination to originate the ‘felt_space infrastructure’, a relational system of measurement concerned with the role of perception in mediating sensory space and the cognised environment. The methodological model for this research fuses perception and environmental stimuli, into a consistent generative process that penetrates the inner essence of space, to reveal the visceral parameter. These concepts are applied to develop a ‘coefficient of affordance’ typology, ‘hypervigilant’ tool set, and ‘cognitive_tope’ design methodology. Thus, by extending the architectural platform to consider perception as a design parameter, the thesis interprets the ‘inference schema’ as an instructional model to coordinate the acquisition of spatial reality through tensional and counter-tensional feedback dynamics. Three site-responsive case studies are used to advance the thesis. The first case study is descriptive and develops a typology of situated cognition to extend the ‘granularity’ of perceptual sensitisation (i.e. a fine-grained means of perceiving space). The second project is relational and questions how mapping can coordinate perceptual, cognitive and associative attention, as a ‘multi-webbed vector field’ comprised of attractors and deformations within a viewer-centred gravitational space. The third case study is causal, and demonstrates how a transactional-biased schema can generate, amplify and attenuate perceptual misalignment, thus triggering a visceral niche. The significance of the research is that it progresses generative perception as an additional variable for spatial practice, and promotes transactional methodologies to gain enhanced modes of spatial acuity to extend the repertoire of architectural practice.