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Asian vernacular architecture is generally dynamic, progressing and constantly transforming. The significance of Asian vernacular values lies in the culture, identity and memory of the people rather than the fabric or preserved artefacts. Likewise, the vernacular traditional Malay houses are a manifestation of the craft process and meanings embodied in the people, their building practice and artefacts. However, the Malay building culture is diminishing while the numbers of tukang or master craftsmen is declining, which adds to the loss of traditional knowledge and skills in Malay house building culture. The study investigates the traditional craft of Malay house-building within the present in order to identify the legacy of Malay craftsmanship concerning knowledge and skills of tukang and their apprentices. Furthermore, the study explores contemporary Malay building practice and inquiring how traditions were and continued to be conveyed towards building participants. The unstructured interviews with tukang, experts and non-experts, while observing building activities were used to provide insights of the Malay house building culture within contemporary. The methodology adopted is relevant as much of the craft knowledge and skills are embodied and performed, rather than articulated in oral or literature. The study concluded that Malay architecture is rooted not in the tangible built fabric but in the knowledge and dexterity of tukang and the craft process relating to materials, tools, measurement and bodily movement. Similarly, the meaning of Malay craftsmanship is defined by tukang and embodied in their practice. However, tukang is more than simply a builder but has a spiritual role that connects the Malay cultural beliefs to the Malay house and the building process. Hence, the study implies that the Malay house building is a form of a spiritual practice emphasising the value of culture, memory and religious identity rather than purely narrating the structures. Furthermore, the findings of the study suggest that essential qualities of craftsmanship, knowledge and skills in Malay house-building are exemplified subliminally within the actions of buka-pasang or disassembly and assembly. The study demonstrates that the practice of disassembling and assembling existing Malay structures, was and still remain as a socially communicative act in transmitting building traditions. The study characterised the disassembly and assembly as a building process involving dyadic knowledge of technical (strategy) and spiritual (cultural) that manifest the poetics, procedural, ritual and somatic means of Malay house-building culture. Therefore the study asserted that performing disassembly and assembly afford to a sense of retracing footsteps of past mastery as an embodied heritage experience - hence comparable to the apprenticeship-style of learning that demonstrates the process of mimetic, causal learning and reflective cognitive process. Eventually, the study expresses that the values of Malay cultural heritage are not in the static heritage artefact, but the physical and spiritual interaction between artefacts and the people in the present. The answer to the loss of heritage and the decline of traditional building practice and knowledge it offers is through disassembly and assembly, where the study views this process as a catalyst in overcoming these shortcomings.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI in short) is a multi-disciplinary approach aimed at enriching physical environments with a network of distributed devices in order to support humans in achieving their everyday goals. However, in current research and development, AmI is still largely considered within the engineering domain bearing undeveloped relationship with architecture. The fact that architecture design substantially aims to address the requirements of supporting people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and practices with spatial strategies. These are common to the AmI’s objectives and purposes, and we aim at considering the possibilities or even necessities of investigating the potential design approach accessible to an architectural context. For end users, AmI is a new type of service. Designing and evaluating the AmI experience before resources are spent on designing the processes and technology needed to eventually run the service can save large amounts of time and money. Therefore, it is essential to create an environment in which designers can involve real people in trying out the service design proposals as early as possible in the design process. Existing cases related to stakeholder engaged design of AmI have primarily focused on engineering implementation and generally only present final outcome to stakeholders for user evaluation. Researchers have been able to build AmI prototypes for design communication. However, most of these prototypes are typically built without the involvement of stakeholders and architects in their conceptual design stage. Using concepts solely designed by engineers may not be user centric and even contain safety risks. The key research question of this thesis is: “How can Ambient Intelligence be designed through a participatory process that involves stakeholders and prospective users?" The thesis consists of the following five components: 1) Identification of a novel participatory design process for modelling AmI scenarios; 2) Identification of the requirements to support prototyping of AmI design, resulting in a conceptual framework that both "lowers the floor" (i.e. making it easier for designers to build the AmI prototypes) and "raises the ceiling" (i.e. increasing the ability of stakeholders and end users to participate in the design process deeply); i 3) Prototyping an experimental Mixed Reality Modelling (MRM in short) platform to facilitate the participatory design of AmI that supports the requirements, design process, and scenarios prototyping; 4) Case study of applying MRM platform to participatory design of a Smart Laser Cutting Workshop(LCW in short) which used to evaluate the proposed MRM based AmI design approach. The result of the research shows that the MRM based participatory design approach is able to support the design of AmI effectively.

This thesis is a theoretical-empirical study that investigates the consequences and implications of adopting locative media technologies in everyday situations, paying particular attention to the potential strengthening of relationships between locative media and spatial practices of architecture and urban studies. Locative Media is a type of media technology that relates information to location/place, provides sites and occasions for the development of new forms of environmental knowing, spatial and cultural understandings, and arguably constructs new spatial relations with place, place-experience and sense of place. Although there is a vast literature on the socio-spatial and cultural implications of media technologies, social media, social networking sites and other applications accessed through the Internet, there are limited numbers of studies that explore the shift in the ways we understand and relate to virtual materials/information following the emergence of location- based technology, and how those technologies might affect the conventional ways we develop relationships/associations with location/places, or perceive places, or understand spatiality. Tracing the emergence of locative media and the new implications of map/representation, the thesis takes locative media as the subject under scrutiny and investigates the assemblage and interrelationships of the three main ingredients of place/locative media/ agent. The interrelationship of those three ingredients and the social and behavioural norms of using Locative media in real time is explored through an empirical lens using two case studies (individuals using Foursquare/Streetmuseum applications), where three main categories of locative media applications (urban annotation/tagging applications, user-generated maps and social networking applications) are explored. The findings of empirical studies, and issues regarding implications of locative media, are then categorized into thematic chapters: locative media and Image of place, Place-making potentials of new media technologies, locative media and alternative flexible forms of sociability, and finally possibilities of relational place- understanding: In-group experiences. Since the field of locative media is very new, theories and ways of discussing related phenomenon are not yet strongly developed: thus whilst examining existing cases empirically, this thesis also contributes to on-going theoretical discourses regarding place-understanding after new media technologies (tracking the change in place-understanding), and the interconnected issues of spatiality resulting from mediation, embodiment, mobility, technology, and community. Therefore the findings of the empirical studies feed into the process of developing related theories, and construct an argument that locative media could be considered as both Transcendental Technologies (technologies that transcend spatiality, geography and territory) and Socio-Formative Spheres (technologies that form socio-spatial interactions) based on the frames of observation. It also provides an insight into the possible ways that new media technologies can be applied as tools or mediums for architects and urban planners to rewrite the city, to communicate with communities of users, or to adopt those media platforms as site analysis mediums, tools for collecting and sharing site-related information in new, practical ways.

Architecture and arts practices were arguably kept apart during the first half of the 20th century, resisting an emerging overlap that was conducted by both artists and architects. Installation art has subsequently emerged as an art practice but has shared many qualities with architecture because of its creation of spatial territory. Thus, in contemporary art, installation art has been moving in the fluxes between art and architecture. In the case of installation art, a temporary space is created along with a new kind of engagement and perception of the places around us. It motivates the spectator’s imagination when they are inside, experiencing a shelter that is new to the context. At the same time, it motivates memories of that experience after the installation space is removed. Mediating architecture with a spatial medium like an installation invites a new reading of the space to be applied. This reading opposes the interpretation of architecture as still signs, objects or still images, mainly because of the continuous unfolding of the art installation and the close involvement of the viewer in the spectating journey. Consequently, mediating the exhibition space through an installation creates narratives that are subjective and context-specific, while their transition through other mediums continues to alter the original narrative after the work is dismantled. Driven from the proposition that the event of a temporary installation can be articulated by the ‘event’; a concept that French philosopher Gilles Delleuze addresses in his study: The Fold, which considers the accumulated influence of a number of perceptions of space, the thesis discusses the alternative scenarios of reading the temporary architectural space while focusing on the narrative of these architectural happenings by referring mainly to Mieke Bal’s ‘narratology’ as an approach to this new understanding. Before experiencing examples of installation art, a methodological technique; collage- de-collage-re-collage, is presented as a tool to negotiate the narratives collected from the case studies. It is formulated after a theoretical structure is set to investigate the case studies where a need to develop tools of analysis and representation becomes obvious to the work. The study then tests the proposed theoretical framework on three examples, each of which represents a level of temporality in space. As they unfold, the study tracks the encounters that may be further used as instruments to extend the understanding of installation art in particular and temporary spaces in general.