The Place of Narrative is an exploration of the implications, opportunities and processes posed by participatory design methods in Landscape Architecture. The thesis has been structured within a narrative inquiry framework that is situated within the larger field of qualitative research. The work aspires to assess if the combination of community engagement and narrative inquiry methods can contribute to a richer understanding of place and inspire more contextually appropriate design responses. In landscape architecture, a deep understanding of the places that we design requires knowledge of local culture and the experiences and connections that people cultivate towards their environment over time. Being in place as designer, visitor and inhabitant helps to establish a level of trust. These stories of the residents—past and present, of designer, and of the landscape itself interweave and manifest in site-specific solutions. The ambition of this research is to capture the complexity of this process and to provide a primer for landscape architecture students interested in the integration of narrative theory, place, people and practice in community participatory design.

Studies about hot spots of crimes have found that crimes are clustered; few places have many crimes. There is a consensus among criminologists that opportunities for crimes are important when explaining hot spots, at some places, there are more opportunities than at other places. The same applies for hot spots of robberies. Most studies done on the subject are quantitative, relatively little is done using a qualitative approach. Furthermore, little research is done in a Swedish or Scandinavian context. To fill these research gaps this study use participant observations to research five hot spots of robberies in Malmö. The research will try to answer which characteristics are important to explain why the places are hot spots and what the similarities and differences there between the places are. This will be analyzed using the Routine Activity Theory and the Crime Pattern Theory. The findings suggest that place-specific things are important to explain why the places are hot spots, but when using the theories several places are similar.

The thesis project is an exploration of interaction design possibilities within thespaces of public transport in urban India and the challenges for design in these large,disorderly contexts. These public transit spaces offer a microcosmic view of thecurrent urban environment of India, where new paradigms of technology adoptionare emerging, and provide significant scope for interaction design to learn from andcontribute to in diverse ways.As the theme of public transport and its encompassing spaces are traditionallyapproached from urban planning and engineering perspectives, this thesis aims toexplore the urbanism of transit places from the framework of place-specificcomputing, which is a perspective on mobile and ubiquitous computing, and adesign methodology that is grounded in and emanating from the social and culturalpractices of a particular place. To understand and evaluate the environment, theproject makes use of elements of participatory design, brainstorming techniques likeplacestorming, and experience prototyping methodologies, a way for users to interactdirectly with the prototype, and thus at each stage of the design process explores therole of prototyping to generate reflective discussion.The thesis proposes Crowd Compass, an information service based on crowd density,that is available freely anywhere but only of value in a certain context to support aspecific decision, and expires instantly. The thesis also presents a new paradigm fordesign in large scale, disorderly contexts: crowd density, a parameter of contextualinformation for transit; and the concepts of a semi-controlled space for earlyprototyping, analytic and generative maps for effective analysis, and the significanceof design from “the inside”.

This project is about creating for/with humans and the rest of nature. The design is composed of five holistically sustainable beehotels with mental strengthealing journaling tools engraved into them. These beehotels have shifted away from anthropocentrism and are instead geared towards the needs of the pollinators, they are fully created from the forest they are made for. And the journaling exercises have been created to encourage self-exploration to recognize our own strength and build emotional intelligence. The entire design is a way to reflect on our actions.

This paper explores the possibilities concerning the use of smartwatches for practical use when cycling in the city of today. What is explored specifically is how place-specific information can be displayed in the user interface of the smartwatch in the best way possible, while cycling in an urban context. A design proposal is therefore presented as a means to prove the beneficial aspects of place-specific services in the context of cycling. This proposal is based on analysing user feedback upon usability testing performed on the prototypes developed for this purpose.