The structure and shape of an urban environment influence our ability to find our way about in the city 1-2. Indeed, urban designers who face the challenge of planning environments that facilitate wayfinding 3 , have a consequent need to understand the relations between the urban environment and spatial cognition 4. Previous studies have suggested that certain qualities of city elements, such a...

security is one of the most critical factors affecting the quality of urban spaces. nowadays, most of these spaces have become merely pathways with neither social life nor sense of belonging to it. insufficiency of public surveillance along with weak sense of control and surveillance results in spaces with high crime rate. in the late 60s and early 70s, high crime statistics in open urban space...

Deciding the desirable user experience qualities, i.e. UX goals, for a future product or service is important but difficult. This case study explores how a set of qualities is articulated in the concept design process. The case is a project aimed at exploring the use of smartphones to augment the childhood home of Astrid Lindgren—the children’s book author—with stories about her life and author...

The activity of judging design alternatives is without doubt one of the key activities for successful design work, but the criteria used for judging goodness are often implicit. This article is about how to work with ‘use-qualities’ when judging the goodness of interactive media systems. Usequalities denote the attributes of artefacts in use (e.g. effectiveness, safety, awkwardness). A theoreti...

Interaction design is about creating conditions for good use of digital designs. But the only way to learn those conditions, to understand the relations between design choices and resulting use, is still largely by practice and apprenticeship. I propose to think about interaction design in terms of use qualities, i.e., certain properties of a digital design that are experienced in its use. Such...

Existing homes for senior population may not be safe because many injuries occur due to poor accessibility and design compatibility. Thus, Universal Design (UD) becomes more relevant, especially if it incorporates the principles of sustainability. Yet, adopting houses of this type requires detailed evaluation of their costs and benefits in a simple and efficient manner. The Building Information...

Computational representation of spatial qualities can lead us to a better understanding of how we construct spatial concepts. Analyses of spatial qualities can support architects in reasoning about the form of a configuration, helping them predict the consequences of a design. In this paper we present three definitions (enclosure, viewfield, continuity) that describe experiential qualities of a...

Common approaches to mapping green infrastructure in urbanised landscapes invariably focus on measures of land use or land cover and associated functional or physical traits. However, such onedimensional perspectives do not accurately capture the character and complexity of the landscapes in which urban inhabitants live. The new approach presented in this paper demonstrates how open-source, hig...

“Architectural quality” is a property of the built environment that, even though often quoted, is hard to define in rigorous terms. In our work, we take a step into that direction, based on recent results in cognitive sciences: We have conducted a survey in which our participants were asked to mark the occurrence of five qualities (monumental; progressive; structured; conservative; puristic) in...