Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Laurence A. Clement / Contemporary design of the urban environment focuses increasingly upon the quality of space found within the public right-of-way. Landscape architects and urban planners are beginning to ask new questions that deviate from the conventional streetscape designs of the latter half of the 20th century. Under the mantra “complete the streets,” communities all across America are calling for a paradigm shift towards multimodal, pedestrian-scaled urban rights-of-way. At the same time, existing stormwater and combined sewer infrastructure is nearing the end of its productive lifespan in cities all across the country and world. The direct costs associated with repairing this infrastructure combined with the indirect costs of poor water quality and a greater frequency and intensity of flooding events downstream present a strong argument for developing new, innovative ideas about how to best design the stormwater infrastructure of tomorrow. The reintegration of ecological processes into the urban fabric will act as a catalyst for the appreciation of genius loci (spirit of the place) and user meaning while mitigating downstream flooding, increasing water quality, and extending the lifespan of existing stormwater infrastructure. By studying the hierarchical categorization of urban rights-of-way according to increased levels of user orientation, this research project aims to clearly articulate a new theoretical framework for expanding upon the current discourse surrounding “complete streets” and “green streets” theory. In the long-term, it is both economically and socially profitable for cities to use ecological processes to reclaim auto-oriented, urban rights-of-way as valuable public space for the health, safety, and welfare of all their users.

The rapid improvement of hardware and internet speed in modern societies has contributed to more vibrant websites with lots of motion, which often has a correlation to a better user experience, but not always. Scroll-hijacked websites are one of the more controversial techniques, a questionable action where one modifies the default scroll behaviour, which affects the preconceived notions about how to navigate a website. But the effect can be beneficial when one wants to draw attention to crucial call-to-action (CTA) elements.  This thesis resulted in creating a scroll-hijacked prototype based on an already deployed event website with lots of vital CTA elements. The developed prototype was then evaluated against the old website through A/B testing with SUS- and NASA-TLX-surveys. These tests and evaluations were performed by a user study with 44 participants. During the thesis, it was found that there are areas of use where it can be favourable to use scroll-hijacking to increase attention for CTA elements, and thereby increase the conversion, but it requires a thoughtful application.