‘Back to the User’ addresses a critical issue in contemporary architectural practice: the dissociation from the user. In the software industry, 10% to 40% of a project’s budget is allocated to ‘User Experience (UX) Research’, which focuses on assessing and fulfilling users’ needs and experiences throughout the entire design process. This investment not only doubles sales but also nearly triples user satisfaction. Despite its proven value, UX Research is significantly underrepresented in architecture. This paper explores how to better integrate and utilize UX Research in architectural practice, proposing a new methodology.

The methodology closest to UX Research in architecture is ‘Post-Occupancy Evaluation’ (POE), but only 5% of architectural firms in the EU offer (and even fewer conduct) it during the design phase. Architects may talk closely with clients, but not with users. Additionally, most UX Research involves 1:1 prototype testing with users to ensure that the design meets its intended benefits. In architecture, ‘prototyping’ usually consists of 2D plans, visualizations, or scaled models, which are often not comprehensible, accurate, or immersive enough. While constructing a full 1:1 prototype is possible, it is not economically, spatially, or sustainably feasible for large projects—or is it?

With the rise of Virtual Reality (VR), we can now test virtually unlimited 1:1 designs, leading to more objective, evidence-based conclusions. This paper explores this approach through participatory qualitative sessions using VR, where multiple design variations are tested and rated by users based on their satisfaction levels. The data collected informs design decisions, resulting in a final proposal to address the challenges of post-Soviet, concrete-prefab panel construction in the ‘Jižní Město’ district of Prague, Czech Republic. This ‘Back to the User’ methodology, is in fact a practice’s step ‘Back to the Future’.

In the summer of 2023, heatwaves became quite prominent in the south of Europe. Due to the extreme heat, the health of those citizens was affected. The Netherlands Meteorological Institute predicts an increase in heatwaves in the future for the Netherlands as well. The main research question is how to propose a strategy for a liveable environment by designing public spaces while mitigating heat stress for vulnerable target groups in the context of Bospolder Tussendijken in Rotterdam. This research questions also how a reproducible tool could help identify heat stress and test design interventions in Dutch cities. The research included a literature review, expert consultations, scenario planning, modelling of the urban environment and mapping techniques.
Comparing the heat stress software reproducibility, computation time, possibility to test design interventions and the scale of modelling were important. Improvements in the reproducibility of the PET map of Koopmans et al. (2020) are made by creating an open-accessible QGIS plugin applicable to Dutch cities. This helps urban designers to indicate and test their design interventions. Refinement of the wind calculation contributed to speeding up calculation times of the wind for neighbourhood and city scale areas. Future research should focus on some refinement in PET calibration to work properly, and advanced wind modelling is required for urban design practices.
The application in the Rotterdam test case study emphasizes the importance of maintaining liveability now and in the future. By enhancing social liveability and physical liveability within a network of heat-mitigating interventions liveability is guaranteed. By revealing the vulnerable groups and their social interactions on a summer day, the most frequently used routes are qualified for refurbishment. Based on the current quality of social space and walkable environment, ownership and degree of open space on the street level, the interventions are chosen for the situation.
The research emphasized the importance of identifying heat stress in public spaces and the need for urgent action to maintain the quality of life in the future. By integrating informed strategies from multiple fields like Geomatics and Urbanism a climate-adaptive and healthy environment can take shape.

The urban heat island effect refers to increased temperatures in highly developed urban areas and has negative impact for human activities and the social environment. This project aims to address this effect by integrating urban forests into the cityscape, while enhancing the living experience of residents.

The project focuses on analyzing cool vegetation characteristics in existing areas and incorporating them into subsequent designs to utilize trees’ cooling capabilities, in order to combating the urban heat island effect and promoting city climate mitigation ability.

Through analyzing the urban ground surface temperature and its relationship with trees, a positive correlation exists. The further design strategy considers tree types, leaf cooling rates, appropriate tree arrangements, and species selection, while addressing factors like shade coverage and adaptability to the urban environment.

Except involves improving existing climate weak areas, this project also formulating a climate mitigation urban development strategy around the urban forest for the city future development.

It’s important to note that the temperature discussed in this project refers specifically to urban surface temperature.

The advent of the internet and digital technology has transformed public spaces, impacting human interactions and diluting their original purpose. However, augmented reality (AR) technology, exemplified by Pokémon Go, presents a unique opportunity to revitalize urban public spaces in the digital era. AR technology offers virtual flexibility, empowering public spaces to become multifunctional environments and redistributing the value of urban areas.
To accommodate this transformative potential, inclusive and enduring architectural structures are needed as resilient containers for AR development. This project focuses on designing robust, inclusive public buildings that seamlessly integrate into the urban fabric undergoing AR development. These structures adapt to the evolving needs and activities facilitated by AR, fostering social interaction and a sense of belonging within the community.
The integration of AR technology necessitates a holistic approach to urban design, extending beyond individual buildings to the broader urban context. By leveraging the transformative power of AR, this project envisions digitally enhanced and physically resilient urban environments that accommodate diverse activities and cultivate community. It explores new paradigms for urban design where public buildings serve as adaptable containers for AR experiences, fostering social cohesion and redefining the relationship between people, architecture, and the environment.
Through the integration of AR technology and thoughtful architectural design, this project showcases the potential for vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable urban public spaces in the digital age. By embracing flexibility, durability, and inclusivity, it establishes a foundation for AR-neutral buildings that respond to the evolving needs and aspirations of urban communities, creating a more engaging and harmonious urban environment.

Zakopane experiences mass tourism, which supports economic growth but also reduces the quality of life in the city. This is mainly due to the developed car dependency, the lack of coordination between spatial development and infrastructure, and the systemic promotion of private property at the expense of the public good, which is a phenomenon characteristic of post-communist countries.

Zakopane needs a transformation of the mobility system in terms of reducing the presence of cars in public spaces in the city while developing a mobility system that includes the spatial specificity of the various urban fabrics in the city (Newman & Kenworthy, 2015). Only by changing the transport system the liveability of public space can be regained.
Given the housing shortage in the city, the development of sustainable mobility also requires a sustainable development perspective.

The strategy of spatial transformation towards sustainable mobility and development must be adapted to neoliberal administrative conditions with limited public budgets and weak bargaining power.

Thanks to the method of research through design as “strongly contextualised research that participates in society” (Nowotny et al. 2010) , with the active participation of the stakeholders, a mobility system transformation strategy was developed based on the perspective of regional cooperation of local tourist municipalities, motivated by a special program of integrated territorial investments. Strategic actions in the long term, including the improvement of spatial quality, have to take into account other partnerships to achieve the goals: cooperation with the private sector.

Strategic actions for improving the quality of public space require both new regulations for its formation and a decision-making system enabling the cooperation of various actors, which have been developed through the simulation of the pilot project.

Thanks to this approach, the strategies for shaping the urban space, its regulations, and the way of implementation have been explored - together with the demonstration of how the needed transformations could look like in reality.

The Erasmus Medical Center (EMC) campus is working on an intensification of functions for the new Masterplan of 2050. Since densification is only possible vertically due to the enclosed location, there is an increase of 5000 employees and only 650 physical parking spaces, leading to lessened accessibility by car. Simultaneously, vehicles are restricted from the city itself to make Rotterdam more livable by taking away car lanes and decreasing speed. While moving through the city, recent patient journey research shows, that patients are worried until they reach the main entrance and do not feel relieved by the current way of traveling towards the Erasmus MC. These findings lead to researching which mobility scenarios are possible and suitable for inclusive accessibility to the future EMC Campus and how spatial interventions can relieve stress during the last mile in Rotterdam and arrival at the masterplan site.

This is done by assessing perceptions on urban stress and restoratives and digitally researching scenarios by the use of personas. Personas are created to react to mobility aspects, resulting in a multi criteria analysis. The motivations summarized are basic needs, personality lifestyle preference, disability, and stress and restorative level. A procedural model in Houdini of the mobility network of Rotterdam, including future scenarios, is used to assess the behavior of the created personas traveling towards the EMC Campus by calculating the weighted sum per route. The output of the simulations shows the taken route, the chosen mode, and the stress and restorative level at arrival from specific personas. The most suitable and preferred routes based on the 4 motivations show significant differences in stress and restorative levels. Spatial aspects in the city influence mental health and design requirements can be advised to minimize urban stress. Previously collected city restoratives and urban stressors are being evaluated by 65 participants in an online survey. Doing stressor and restorative spatial implementations in the simulation shows how personas prefer different routes to potentially improve their wellbeing. Design requirements of the Masterplan can be based on how certain personas perceive the environment differently from others. For people approaching the building by car, it could be more beneficial for the stress and restorative level to have a more monochrome facade and for people approaching the building by slow traffic to have a fine grain facade. The digital model gives a perspective on where the individual personas approach the campus, which influences the master plan differently from all angles. What do persona based design requirements on urban stressors and restoratives derived from digital simulations mean to the design of our future cities?

One in five municipalities in the Netherlands is prognosed to experience population decline by 2050. Especially rural settlements will have difficulty facilitating this shrinkage and the negative effects involved. With a depriving variety of available facilities and an increase in vacancy, local communities are on the border of falling apart. At the same time, an increasing number of churches are left vacated and out of service while religious participation declines. This graduation project aims to revitalize the heart of villages with the church at the center to increase the livability and social cohesion. Connecting the local community with the heritage of churches and their role in society again. With a toolbox filled with design interventions as a final product and the implementation of this toolbox on three different project locations throughout the Netherlands, this thesis provides a first step to a beckoning new perspective on the identity of rural cores.

This project addresses the many inhuman-scale superblocks that have resulted from the rapid urbanization of China over the past decades. These superblocks suffer from problems such as poor accessibility and a monotonous urban landscape. This project begins with a review of the development of superblocks in the West and in China, where superblocks have inherited the ancient Chinese urban paradigm while also being influenced by modernist urban planning. At the same time, China's land finance policy has created a reliance on superblocks as an urban development model for both government and developers. The need for urban regeneration and urban densification is both a challenge and an opportunity for the transformation of superblocks. Using Shenzhen as an example, two superblocks are selected for analysis and design based on the extent of the need for urban regeneration. By analyzing the network and functional distribution of these two superblocks, the problems of superblocks can be attributed to the abuse of closed neighborhoods and the mismatch between networks and activities. In addition, the current urban regeneration model in Shenzhen does not effectively improve the problems of superblocks. Thus, the project proposes that the regeneration units of superblocks should be integrated at the district scale and the degree of integration of the superblock network should be improved. At the same time, existing closed settlements should be replaced by more open block types to produce smaller blocks and more frequent streets and to match the functions corresponding to the road hierarchy. In addition, supporting block management policies need to be developed. Ultimately these strategies will be shown as an urban design scheme that will enable the transformation of superblocks to more livable blocks.

The importance of train stations in the Netherlands is growing next to the numbers of passengers. The pandemic hampered the growth that could not be accommodated by the infrastructure. In Europe the future of rail looks bright, as it is essential to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, while in the Netherlands, train station areas were recognized as one of the main sites for densification until 2030, which aims to tackle the housing crisis.National ambitions are high, but at the same time there is no coherent national agenda for train stations. Municipalities are competing with each other, and stations acts as hubs of capital allocation rather than catalysts of sustainability transition. This results in growing disparities between small and large stations, and between Randstad and other regions. The disruption of the pandemic gives an opportunity to rethink this unsustainable, neoliberal development model.
The key proposal of this project is to turn around the dominant paradigm of train station areas. Nodes consuming fossil energy and hectic places oriented on business could evolve into hubs of green energy and livable, equitable neighborhoods. The place-node model established by Luca Bertolini (1996) should be reframed by adding the dimension of livability and energy, to address housing and climate crises.
A pattern language was chosen a method to integrate the observations from case studies, experience from practice, insights from literature, create a catalog of patterns - good practices, and apply it to site-specific design. Interrelated patterns forming a language offer more possibilities than a toolbox or a set of principles, and may help with decision-making and defining the program of a station area with multiple stakeholders.
Applying patterns is in fact programming a station area during workshops with relevant stakeholders. Four design scenarios are demonstrating this process and speculating on future-proof train stations. Short-term (2026) and long-term (2040) scenarios were explored in Amsterdam Sloterdijk and Bergen op Zoom. Designs in two different contexts of large and small station were then assessed by the framework developed from Bertolini’s model, in terms of node, livability, place and energy, demonstrating how could development according to a new paradigm look like.

Users in traditional office buildings often experience discomfort with the indoor environment and have issues with how this is being regulated. Research has shown that users’ satisfaction in an office building, which consists of their comfort and health, reflects on their work productivity. Therefore, necessary measures need to be taken in order to be able to suffice the office users’ needs. Also, due to the fact that the building sector in Europe is responsible for an energy consumption of 40% of the final energy use and this leads to high carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels, the European Commission has stipulated regulations, where it is stated that all new buildings have to be nearly zero-energy by the beginning of 2021. Due to the fact that the façade is one of the buildings’ components which has high impact on the indoor comfort and energy use of the building, taking the user’s comfort needs and designing this from the conceptual design phase, can help achieve user satisfaction and enhance work productivity, while also helping achieve nearly energy neutrality.

This research aims to investigate the relevant factors of user satisfaction that could be implemented into façade design, while also investigating state of the art interactive/adaptive façade technologies (passive and active) and energy efficient façade design methods, in order to provide design solutions which optimally satisfies office users’ needs of comfort, and therefore increases work productivity, and also supports nearly energy neutrality of office buildings. This leads to the research question of, “How can an interactive/adaptive office building façade element be designed to optimally satisfy its users in order to increase work productivity and to support nearly energy neutrality of office buildings?”. Optimal indoor satisfaction is defined as office users being thermally comfortable, experiencing comfort in the air quality indoors, the acoustics, and the lighting, and also when other human preferences are met such as, having control of their environment, having a view, and having an appealing place to work.

Based on literature review regarding user satisfaction, façade design, state of the art interactive/adaptive technologies, and energy efficient design methods, the design considerations were stipulated. These are user comfort, user control, energy efficiency, and user preferences. The user preferences is the most subjective criteria, because it expresses the preferences and desires of specific type of people. Therefore, this research presents office façade designs for specific type of users, namely the Energy Efficient archetype, the Self-Adaptive environment archetype, and the Full-Control of their environment archetype. The evaluation of these design configurations show that it is almost impossible to have one interactive/adaptive façade design that complies with all of the user
preferences of all types of users, because every type of user has different preferences and some might contradict each other. Nevertheless, this research concludes on design characteristics derived from the presented design
configurations, which show how the most optimal officer-user oriented façade design should function, that can ensure user satisfaction for different types of users and can help its building become nearly energy neutral.

This research focuses on the relation between the compact city and urban life. Literature suggests that a holistic approach to further compacting a city means also integrating urban life qualities. This is currently lacking in Western European practice due to pragmatism, decentralisation and neo-liberal plot-led development. This while both concepts are crucial for sustainable cities. Therefore an optimization of their relation is needed in order to make better choices regarding densification. The result is a research-by-design that researches three distinct themes that are related to incorporating urban life. These are urban volumes, urban network and urban quality. The Dutch densification site ‘Central Innovation District’ in the Hague is used as a case study for applying the found design principles. In order to measure and predict the character of spaces, modern modes of measuring the city are used. Most prominently are the methods of space syntax angular integration, betweenness shortest path algorithms and the spacematrix GSI/FSI density ratios. Moreover, because of its focus on the human scale, 3D modelling is a crucial part of the research. The research concludes that the compact city and urban life can be integrated with eachother by following a set of principles for volumes, slow traffic networks and urban quality. What is needed is a broader overview of what attractors and pedestrian flows will emerge in a plan area. The associated centralities can then be used to shape the volumetric properties in such a way that significant densification can be achieved while urban life values like human scale stay assured.

Route choice of cyclists recently became a hot topic of research for different disciplines such as transport and urban planning. Among other factors that influence these route choices, the urban environment has been identified as one in a network, road or aesthetic level. However, how the morphology of the built environment influences the cyclists remains rather unexplored. Considering that two routes are equally distant and safe, would a cyclist choose the most idyllic route in terms of its spatial openness? This thesis aims to explore the extent that the visible views of the urban environment affect the route choosing of a cyclist while traveling in the center of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It also For this purpose, 127 GPS trajectories of the Fietstelweek dataset of 2015 are compared with alternative routes suggested by OpenStreetMap (OSM) via the OpenRouteService Directions API. The suggested alternatives can be either the fastest routes, the longest routes or those recommended by OSM (in terms of travel distance, travel time or safety. Throughout this MSc thesis a methodology based on the visibility of the cyclistis proposed. The visibility analysisis based on the ray casting algorithm in a 3D environment and gives as an output 3D isovists. The 3D isovists are used in order to measure the spatial openness as the ratio of the amount of visible sky, visible buildings and visible ground, as well as the shape of the 3D isovist itself. Opposite to similar researches that are performing the visibility analysis on the actual GPS routes, this thesis project applies the visibility analysis to a simplified version of the OSM street network in the centre of Amsterdam. The simplified OSM street network consists of street segments, the nodes of which represent real road intersections. The output of the visibility analysis per street segment is later mapped to the GPS trajectories and the alternative routes as an aggregated value. Finally, the routes are compared to each other with the ANOVA statistical method (N=127) and the Tukey’s post hoc test, resulting to a quantification of the differences of the GPS routes in terms of spatial openness. The results of the statistical analysis indicate the importance of the distance in the cyclists route choices but also the importance of the ratio of buildings and visible sky, the ratio of buildings and ground as well as a significant preference of the cyclists towards non-homogeneous routes with variation on the street profiles. We consider the methodology as an interesting proposal of measuring attributes that are difficult to be interpreted by using the traditional space syntax methodology and as a new way to provide design guidelines of the city to urban planners and architects when a detailed 3D environment is provided.

Virtual reality technology has captured the human imagination since before the first ceiling mounted glasses were invented in the 1960’s. Curiosity towards seeing what we can’t see and experiencing what we can’t experience, is one of the drivers behind societal and scientific progress.

In 2012, the technology saw a new phase of development start. Now, professions like architecture and urban design, professions that try to communicate ideas, have started to implement the technology. The entertainment industry is running with it. The first commercial sets have been a success. This time, it seems that VR is here to stay.

What happens then with the environment that we can see? This question becomes relevant now. Cyberpunk - a submovement of science fiction - always shows us the dystopian image. The metropole becomes neglected as people leave behind the physical world and loose themselves in the digital.

These works of fiction have functioned as a red flag and have inspired this thesis. Within, the discussion is not whether or when VR is going to feature in the daily lives of people - the question is what the effect will be.

Through the lense of VR development, current developments in the urban public space are scrutinized. The objective: to make sure that neglecting the city is not the path humanity will end upon.

This graduation thesis concerns the reintegration and reinterpretationof infrastructure in the urban landscape. Since the Industrial Revolution,people and cities have become more dependent on cars, and by the mid-20th century, infrastructure moved toward being a component of trafficmanagement, instead of urbanism. In urban situation, this caused barriers andisolated spaces, breaking up the fine grained pedestrian network. The cardependent city has serious consequences for health, social connectednessand the environment.In the research location Toronto, large infrastructural elements are imposingthemselves as a barrier between the city and the waterfront. In order toreconnect the city to its Waterfront, streets need to be rediscovered as socialspace and the balance between a street as ‘movement space; and ‘socialspace’ has to be restored. ‘Walkability‘ is the key. A theoretical framework on‘Access & Linkage’ and ‘Placemaking’ will support the design for a succesfulpedestrian network in the city.A new pedestrian network, supported by an intensive and diverse land-use,connects landmarks, parks and attractive facilities in the area, and offers manyopportunities for people to meet, relax, play, run, do sports, and so on. Thedesign will attract public life and contribute to an active lifestyle, with positiveresults for health and social connectedness. The project can serve as anexample for other car dominated cities or for other areas in Toronto whereinfrastructure is causing problems and limits the walkability of the city. When walkability is applied in more cities in the world, this will have positiveresults on the environment.

This master thesis discusses to what extend a productive open space system can increase the accessibility to local income generation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The rapid urbanising capitol of a mainly rural country cannot keep up with providing employment, housing and transportation for its current and future residents. The result is high travel costs in terms of money and time and poor access to income generation for a large share of the urban population. The aim of this thesis to investigate whether a more local approach can contribute to increasing accessibility. By designing current unused open spaces to be productive, for social activity, commercial activity and for producing (such as agriculture) activity, the accessibility to local income generation increases. The thesis discusses the Weyira sefer, a neighbourhood located in the west of Addis Ababa.

The current trend towards the use of smart tools within universities open up new opportunities. Insight in the location and daily rhythms of users within the building form valuable input for many decision-making processes within campus management. Unlike the outdoor environment, where the position is easily obtained through omnipresent satellite-based positioning systems such as GPS, the use of these systems in indoor environments is limited. Various implementations of indoor positioning systems try to fill this gap and provide indoor positioning capabilities. However, the complex indoor environment presents its own challenges regarding positioning. The effectiveness of current implementations varies depending on techniques and methods used, while often being limited to function only within small test bed environments. Privacy, cost, scalability, ease of integration in the environment and many other decisive factors steer the choice for certain indoor positioning systems. Within this research the focus is on the development of a non-intrusive network-based indoor positioning system using Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has clear advantages over other measuring techniques in that these systems are ubiquitous, cost-effective and their use is multi-faceted. Now over 85% of the users carry a smartphone. These off-the-shelf, unmodified smartphones and other Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices can be used as mobile stations to indicate user locations through an iterative positioning process. Besides the mobile stations, existing Wi-Fi infrastructures and networking equipment can be re-used with minor adaptations. The following research question was addressed in this research: 'To what extent can indoor Wi-Fi positioning be used for indoor localisation in order to determine occupancy rhythms and movement patterns within and between rooms to support campus management?'. The research question was approached starting with exploring the different techniques and methods suited for indoor positioning or localisation. The case study was used to review and develop a system suitable for indoor campus environments. As the case study requires a non-intrusive and low-cost solution that functions without active user participation a signal propagation-based technique was chosen. Distances were estimated employing the signal strength metadata extracted from various 802.11 management frames originating from user mobile devices. Various influences on the Wi-Fi signals were identified and a solution to counteract those influences was designed in the form of a differential Wi-Fi system using a grid of interconnected reference stations. With the use differential Wi-Fi correction parameters the positioning improved by mitigating for temporal environmental influences that are continuously present in indoor environments. Next, based on a comparison of different methods, a multilateration method was developed as the core of the positioning system. The multilateration algorithms combined with various filtering algorithms provide for a highly maintenance-free system with minimal manual set-up required. As the environment changes new training data is automatically acquired for ready-use. All algorithms were designed to work both in (near) real-time as well as non real-time, with configurable processing delays of at least 10 seconds. The longer delays allow for more observations, while the shorter delays are better for moving users and fast updates. Accuracies of 2 meters at the lower bounds are reported, ranging up to the 10 meter mark due to Wi-Fi characteristics. Various filtering and post-processing mechanisms were designed to generate accurate mappings from mobile devices to user counts. Furthermore, in the preparation phase different geometries were tested with reference stations 10 to 20 meters apart from each other. Preferred spatial geometries were matches as closely as possible for the deployment of the system in a real-world test case scenario. The designed reference stations were deployed in the Architecture faculty building to monitor occupancy and movement patterns before, during and after a fire drill. Ground truth was acquired using BLE wrist bands and manual counting. The fire drill had different elements: counting the number of users per m2 and per room, the occupancy rhythms over time and the movement patterns. Overall during 48% of the uncontrolled testing a 100% match between BLE wrist band equipped user counts and Wi-Fi counts was achieved. In 77% of the cases there was a 1 person difference in counting, where in more than 95% of the cases the maximum difference was 4 persons. In conclusion, with this localisation system the occupancy rhythms and movement patterns of users can be measured to a large extent to aid in the various tasks of campus management, e.g. planning, and safety evacuations.

During the last few years, Virtual Reality (VR) technology has evolved at an impressive pace. The newest VR systems offer a high level of visual realism and accurate interaction with the virtual environment through spatially tracked controllers. This technology is increasingly being applied in many professions, but in architecture and urbanism the use of VR was mostly restricted to visualization purposes. Meanwhile, an increasing amount of (3D) data becomes available which is now mostly visualised with 2D screens, while there exists a plenitude of complex urban problems that could potentially benefit from the use of this data. Also, our cities are still mainly designed with traditional design methods such as sketches on paper and unintuitive CAD software. These methods are viewed on 2D screens, often from bird’s eye view, while our cities are in 3D and experienced from eye level perspective. Designing in VR could potentially bring the designer on eye level and connect the design with the world of available 3D data, offering a new, intuitive design method: 3D hand movements.
This project focuses on the application of VR in an urban design process with current state of the art VR hard- and software. A design area was converted into a 3D virtual environment, a VR design tool was created and then used to create multiple design variants in VR. The lessons that were learned during this research form a first step towards new design methods, making use of the possibilities of software and immersion offered by VR.

This paper has its focus on the accessibility, interoperability and quality of different point cloud datasets. The main objective of the project is to research the process of harmonizing point cloud datasets of different origins and to incorporate the integrated datasets in a web viewer that allows for visualization and analysis. As a case study, the Three-Country Point (TCP) where Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands share a border is evaluated.

This synthesis project is focused on implementing an Internet of Things (IoT) network to measure environmental data in the city of Delft. This network consists of sensor platforms that are placed in the urban environment. Each sensor platform is mounted on fixed locations and it is not moved during the measurement time. The aim is to raise community’s environmental awareness to improve the quality of the environment.
Recent developments in technology made it possible to fabricate small, efficient, and reliable sensors boards which are the base of these sensors platforms and making them efficient and reliable. Sensor boards like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and LoPy are some examples of these small sensor boards. In this project, the LoPy is used which is a sensor board that is equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy, Wifi and a LoRa radio. This last one is a communication technology that makes longer communication distances possible.
The sensor network measures four different environmental indicators that will be distributed to the public: temperature, humidity, noise and air quality. The network then communicates via LoRa this data to one centralized server where the data is stored, processed and sent back to the citizens. This data is made publicly accessible to academia, citizens and the stakeholders alike. The network is also made interactive, people who pass by can interact with the sensors and request specific environmental data in real time.
The sensor network has been build and deployed in the city. During the uptime of the network it succeeded to provide the data to the citizens via the feedback mechanisms: a website with a dashboard and an automated twitter account. Local differences have been measured with temperature and humidity sensors. With regard to the noise sensor and air quality sensors no definitive conclusions could be drawn.

We are now gradually entering the era of big data - maybe a bit too much of a buzzword, but it is not lied. Technology is evolving fast, enabling faster and more efficient data acquisition, storage, retrieval and processing. Point cloud datasets are such a type which relies on large files and lots of processing power. The rather fast evolutions in technology enable the shared idea between Delft University of Technology and Fugro of an ‘Open Point Cloud Map’. This Open Point Cloud Map aims at making point cloud datasets easily available to the public, even letting them performsimple analysis. Both Fugro and TU Delft want to take lead in development of such an environment; three student teams from TU Delft thus form a partnership with Fugro to kick-off three in-depth researches which would result in one step closer to the vision of OPCM. The ChronoCity team will focus on the time-component (Figure 1.1) in the acquainted point clouds, while the other two teams focus on location-dependency and different scales and granularities of the datasets.

The Chronocity-team strives to create an online interactive tool which gives the user the ability to view, explore and analyze massive point cloud datasets on-the-fly. Since the limited timespan in which the project should take place this would not yield a fully optimized application, but at least the general principles are defined and evaluated on for a more defined future in the development of the OPCM. A large portion of the efforts will go into making the data and analyses available to the public - in an interactive and user-friendly way; because without this availability, the underlying principles are not brought to the public also. Regarding these underlying principles the most important one is change detection. During the project a suitable algorithm is designed and evaluated for detecting new, removed and changed geometric points.