Work-related stress is an issue of growing concern around the world.[1] The relationship between work stress and individuals’ psychological and physical health is well acknowledged.[2] In the survey of “stress in the workplace” conducted by American Psychological Association in 2012, two in five (41%) of employed adults report that they typically feel stressed during the workday, up from 36% in 2011, while less than six in ten (58%) report that they have the resources to manage work stress.[3] Historically, Central Business Districts are a focal point of cities, and are occupied by a large group of office buildings and a number of retail spaces. According to Elsbach and Bechky (2007), office workers regularly leave their offices in search of more relaxed, creative environments.[4] However, there is limited "third space" to serve office workers' daily life in the central business district. Most of the design research about wellness of office workers have done focus on the spaces in which people work during office hours. Consideration for office workers in the CBD after office hours is relatively rare. What else is needed to support the life of the office worker, and what kind of spaces they are looking for after hours. Several primary research methods were adopted. First, a survey of research on how the design of traditionally planned CBDs fails to support wellness of office workers was made. Then, the thesis examined what is needed to support the wellness of office workers. In order to make it be specific to the office workers in the CBD of Richmond, qualitative methodology, including interviews and video records of the daily CBD living habits were made. In addition, case studies of recently done CBDs that tackle this question. The Shibaura House, designed by Kazuyo Sejima, located in the business district of Tokyo in Japan, will serve as a primary case study. There are three aims in this research. First is the design of a series of mixeduse spaces in an existing building in the Central Business District of Richmond to support the life of office workers after office hours. It also aims to improve wellness of the office workers in the CBD of Richmond, and try to define the CBD in a new way. The preliminary results for this research indicates the importance of the concern for office workers after hours. It is necessary to focus on the practical effect of the mixed-use building on reducing work stress, improving office workers’ health and enhancing wellness of office workers.

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Alltmer tid spenderas i våra närmiljöer samtidigt som den sociala isoleringen ökar i samhället, och det har negativa effekter på hälsan. Närmiljön har därför stor inverkan på vår livsmiljö, där gestaltningen blir avgörande för att främja ett levande stadsrum. Denna studie undersöker det levande stadsrummet genom en fallstudie på Ebbepark i Linköpings kommun och med hjälp av kvalitativa intervjuer och dokumentanalyser. Resultatet visar att byggherrarna har en hög ambitionsnivå vad gäller gestaltningen där kommunen har ett övergripande ansvar att se till kommunens helhetsbehov. Slutsatsen som dras är att den höga ambitionen inte kunnat realiseras. Det kan förklaras av ekonomiska intressen samt bristande regleringar. Regleringarna kan komma att bli striktare för att säkerställa goda livsmiljöer. / The citizens are spending more time in our local environment meanwhile social isolation increases in our society which has a negative impact on our well-beeing. The local environment therefore has a major impact on the living environment, where the urban form becomes decisive in promoting a living urban space. The study examines the concept of life between buildings in a case study of Ebbepark, in the municipality Linköping, using qualitative interviews and document analysis. The result indicates that the developers have a high ambition in the urban form and where the municipality has a comprehensive responsibility to accommodate the society's needs. The conclusion is that the high ambition could not be executed. The explanation of this can be, financial interests and absences of regulations, which may become stricter to ensure quality living environments.

This practicum project explores the intersection of sexual identity and contemporary workplace by means of a proposed gay coworking office in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As a result of increased closures of gay bars and other gay-identified places for developing community, there is a void in the gay community. Drawing from Edward Soja’s theory of thirdspace, this practicum proposes the creation of a new gay community by reimagining workspaces through the lens of gay identity and safe space. The intention of this proposal is to challenge traditional ways of thinking about the office as a predominantly heterosexual domain and to create safe work spaces that celebrate difference. The space focuses on supporting the social and collaborative aspects of coworking while interrogating space that is both work and home, between work and home and neither work or home with the objective of creating a new gay typology. / February 2017

Making up one quarter of the current United States population, some 80 million Generation Y-ers are changing the ways in which we live, work and play. Dubbed “Millennials” this population is comprised of those individuals born between 1980 and 2000. This generation is the first to have been raised with cell phones, the internet, and reality television. The “Selfie” or “Me Generation” is snubbed for narcissism and an instant gratification attitude. Yet on the whole Millennials have progressive values, are well educated, are conscious of their health and are optimistic about the future despite coming of age during the Great Recession. Millennials are also the most diverse, most informed and most well connected generation the United States has ever seen.They are supporters of the locavore movement and conscious of the environment. Their habits and tastes - constant Facebook status updates and Instagram posts - are much more communal in nature than narcissistic, the highest value of which is not “self-promotion, but it’s opposite, empathy -- an open-minded and hearted connection to others.” In this way Millennials are using social media and technology to build community in a new way - virtually. Before there was Facebook or Instagram, people found community in “third places” - social places independent of work or home in which to fraternize and build relationships. In his book, The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg examines the difference between the sociological functions of first place (the home), second place (the workplace) and third place. Third place can be described as the social place, a place independent of the home and workplace in which to fraternize and build community. Oldenburg argued that these places are in general decline, and more recent articles have noted that those brick and mortar third places are now being “hollowed out” by “cyber nomads”, those people in coffee shops and bookstores listening to headphones, typing away on a computer or talking on the phone. James Katz of Rutgers argues that these “physically inhabited by psychologically evacuated” places leave people feeling “more isolated than they would if the cafe were empty.” How do designers create spaces that support Millennials empathetic desire connection, that encourage interaction and that overcome the obstacle of becoming "psychologically evacuated" places?

Der Artikel untersucht einen Werbespot von David Lynch für die Playstation 2 und ordnet ihn in das Universum der Lynch’schen Texte, das Lynchville, ein. Zunächst werden dazu einige regelmäßig wiederkehrende Motive aus dem Werk Lynchs vorgestellt. Es folgt eine eingehende Analyse des Werbespots, in der zahlreiche Parallelen zu den bekannten Filmen des Œuvres aufgezeigt werden. Abschließend wird kurz der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern der Begriff „auteur“ in dieser wohl kommerziellsten aller filmischen Ausdrucksformen überhaupt anwendbar ist. Der Artikel kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass es Lynch in diesem Werbespot gelingt, eine persönliche Visiondurchscheinen zu lassen – und dass die Karte des Lynchville deshalb um einen neuen Ort ergänzt werden muss. / The article analyzes a television-commercial, which David Lynch shot for the launch of Playstation 2. It tries to introduce that commercial into the universe of well known Lynch-Movies, the Lynchville. At first, some of the recurrent motives in Lynch’s work will be discussed. Then the commercial will be analyzed, especially regarding any parallels to Lynch’s Œuvre. Finally, the question will shortly be discussed whether in this most commercial form of filmmaking the term “auteur” can still apply. The article comes to the conclusion, that Lynch succeeds in maintaining his personal vision – and that therefore the map of Lynchville has to be expanded.

When one researches the city, the neighborhood appears as an indispensable building block. Kevin Lynch, In The Image of a City, suggests that neighborhoods are "the basic element of the city" and the main way "most people structure their city". Furthering the idea of the neighborhood as a building block of the city, Sidney Brower discusses the need for different types of neighborhoods to allow for a diverse social setting to create diversity in the city. The research put forward by Lynch and Brower shows the idea of the neighborhood as a strong concept in older cities. However, the concept of the neighborhood has become less apparent in the modern cities and should be revisited in order for the neighborhood to once again be a substantial entity in the city. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg discusses the idea of three realms of life and the balance needed to live a fulfilling life. The first realm centers on the domestic, the second on the productive, and most significantly, the third realm centers on the social aspect. In modern neighborhoods, the idea and the architecture that make the social realm has been lost and must be reintroduced. The significance of reintroducing the third realm is the creation of a strong socially defined neighborhood and one that becomes a more identifiable part of the city. With the concept of the third realm in mind, this thesis posits the introduction of a fully integral layer of social programming that responds to a specific neighborhood condition. This way of conceiving the neighborhood and building upon the existing Main Street, the third realm will serve to facilitate a greater sense of neighborhood place.

This project centers on an office environment and the physical and psychological well-being of the people who work within it. Located at 525 Beresford Avenue in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Churchill Park United Church was converted to serve as an office space for a hypothetical publishing firm, Choice Publications. With recent knowledge concerning the health and well-being of employees, the design of workplaces has shifted to comprise a human-centered approach. The purpose of this practicum project was to investigate the evolving nature of the office and to determine its role regarding the identity, well-being, and behavior of individuals in order to better accommodate their needs. Central to the exploration is the study of environmental psychology theories and the introvert-extrovert dichotomy. Research into third place theory and the significance of home act as the primary lenses to evolve conventional office design into a hybrid of new typologies. / October 2015

In our digitalized world, there are ongoing discussions about the public library as a physical place and if it still has a role in our society. Even though many public libraries in Sweden and other western countries are being closed because of political and economic cuts, people still visit the public library. This gives an indication that the library is important not only as a place to borrow books, but as a physical place. This study will try to find answers to how the library space is being used by the visitors by examining when people come to the library, what people do in the library and who these people are. To find answers to these questions, empirical data based upon observations of the library space has been collected. The method of observation used was the TTTmethod (Track the Traffic) developed by the Norwegian scientist Tord Høivik. The TTT-method is a simple method to observe how the different spaces of the library are being used by walking through all the spaces in the library whilst observing what activities are being done. This is repeated at certain times during the library’s opening hours and over a certain period. In this study, the observations were done in three different time-intervals during the day (morning, daytime and evening), over a twoweek period and resulted in 779 registered observations. These data will be analysed in relation to the four space-model developed by the Danish scientist Dorte Skot-Hansen. The model specifies four overall goals of the public library which are experience, involvement, empowerment and innovation and the different possibilities, described in the model as spaces, that the library can offer to fulfil these goals. These four spaces are inspiration, learning, meeting and performative space. In this study, the space that is mostly used, is knowledge, but in the daytime and the evening, the meeting space is also often used. The activities registered are mostly done by adult people. Children and young people are not often observed in the library-space, which gives an indication that this group, which is a priority in the Swedish library act, is not being attended to as it should be according to this. It is also a quite interesting result that activities done by young people often are activities done in a group of people.