Annalisa Meyboom

This thesis envisions how new mobility can contribute to making cities more sustainable and connected. It investigates a methodology for designing the physical, virtual, urban realms in tandem, across a dynamic timeline. It contributes to ideas on redesigning public spaces to be responsive to real-time use and demand and digitally connected.The thesis contributes to the design of a framework from which to visualize and understand the Digital Twin of the urban realm. Through the lens of the virtual realm, the urban Mobility Hub Network is explored as an Urban Mobility Digital Twin, while geocoded public space is looked at through the lens of Virtual Curb Space.This thesis explores, through speculative design, how cities can start reimagining the curb space – the part of the road typically dedicated to on-street parking – as a valuable physical public space and virtual real-estate that can be leveraged to create a more sustainable city-wide mobility network. Highlighting the role of the curb space as a building block of the network and the process of digital transformation of public space is a key contribution of this thesis. The research identifies opportunities to leverage new technologies in order to achieve the sustainability targets of municipalities and transit authorities regarding urban mobility.Design solutions are explored for the concept of Mobility Hubs, in different scales and typologies, anchored around transit. Mobility Hub components are broken down into different curb-space uses and looked at both in the physical, as in the virtual realms, through a phased approach. Seven case studies of locations in the Metro Vancouver area are explored as proof-of-concept of the speculative design proposal and its transitioning strategy.The transitioning strategy (Transitional Design Methodology) explored in the thesis allows for the incremental evolution of design solutions through experimentation. Tactical Urbanism is used to reduce speed of street reconfiguration with agility, aligning with the piloting of digital innovations and services which respond to real-time use. The thesis identifies that the unpredictable and uncertain outcomes of the deployment of new technologies requires design solutions that leave room for trial-and-error, and that allow for constant adaptation to digital innovations.

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This thesis assembled, tested and demonstrated an inhabitant-centered approach for research and design in Interactive Architecture (IA). It takes an initial step in addressing a critical gap in the field concerning the lack of empirical evidence to support IA’s fundamental claims, especially regarding inhabitant experience. The approach focused on investigating the question of whether inhabitant experience of interactive architecture (IA), presumably dependent on different models of interaction, could support one of the primordial rationales for the social relevance of IA. The rationale states that IA holds the potential to empower inhabitants in participating in the continuous formation of their environment. However, there is no published evidence to date to corroborate the statement’s validity. In fact, very little research has been done to date on inhabitant experience of interactive spaces in general, hindering our ability to justify its use or to properly ground design decisions. Therefore, this thesis presents an exploratory investigation, set to form the basis for the study of agency and empowerment in IA, and aiming to demonstrate an approach to tackle the problem of user-centered design and research in the field. An extensive literature review is thus conducted, from the concept of agency in the social sciences to an overview of the pertinent literature on interaction. Finally, an approach is demonstrated to generate empirical evidences regarding agency in IA. For that, an IA space is designed (comprehending four different models of interaction), assembled and tested, grounded on two user-centered design studies. The first study was an anticipated experience diary study, where 17 participants reported their imagined daily experience with an IA concept. The second study was a user experience survey where 30 participants inhabited and experienced the assembled IA space. This thesis successfully demonstrated a user centered approach for evaluating interaction in IA design concepts, especially with regard to the possibility of fulfilling one of IA’s many untested claims, making explicit the problems and opportunities observed along the process.

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