Existing housing stock must be rehabilitated to meet the new needs of dwellers in the current information society. Consequently, Information and Communications and Automation Technologies (ICAT) must be integrated in living areas. Both shape grammar and space syntax can be used as tools to identify and encode the principles and rules behind the adaptation of existing houses to new requirements. The research proceeds by first identifying the dwellers’ demands and determine how the use of technology influences them. The second step is to identify the functional, spatial, and constructive transformations performed manually by human designers in order to infer the corresponding transformation rules and encode them into a grammar. The third step aims to test the grammar in other dwellings that are part of the corpus of the study.

Advances in robotic construction are evident and increasing every year, bringing present and potential improvements. However, the economic and social impacts are hard to assess and quantify without physical in situ testing, which is expensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a methodology for the simulation of robotic construction technologies, namely drones, using a virtual reality environment. Our hypothesis is that a virtual reality simulation of a robotic construction (H1) has the potential of increasing the precision of predicting the construction duration and cost and (H2) allows for the detection of construction problems. The study begins with a review of the literature on drones, robotic arms, and hybrid automatic construction solutions, as well as virtual reality construction simulations, summarising the robotic technologies currently being used, mainly in academic research, to assemble construction elements. It then proposes a construction simulation methodology applied to three architectonic elements to analyse different approaches and different scenarios for robotic construction simulation methodology. A construction simulation is tested, and the data is analysed and compared with traditional construction methods, focussing on construction time and costs.

Space Syntax and the theory of natural movement demonstrated that spatial morphology is a primary factor influencing movement. This paper investigates to what extent spatial morphology at different scales (node, community and global network) influences the use of public space by micromobility. An axial map and corresponding network for Lisbon’s walkable and open public space, and data from e-scooters parking locations, is used as case study. Relevant metrics and their correlations (intelligibility, accessibility, permeability and local dimension) for the quantitative characterization of spatial morphology properties are described and computed for Lisbon’s axial map. Communities are identified based on the network topological structure in order to investigate how these properties are affected at different scales in the case study. The resulting axial line clustering is compared via the variation of information metric with the clustering obtained from e-scooters’ proximity. The results obtained enable to conclude that the space syntax properties are scale dependent in Lisbon’s pedestrian network. On the other hand both the correlation between these properties, the number of scooters and the variation of information between clusters indicate that the spatial morphology is not the only factor influencing micromobility. Through the comparative analysis between the main properties of the public space network of Lisbon and data collected from e-scooters locations in a timeframe, centrality becomes a dynamic concept, relying not only on the static topological properties of the urban network, but also on other quantitative and qualitative factors, since the flows’ operating on the network will operate several transformations on the spatial network properties through time, uncovering spatiotemporal dynamics.

This paper presents an analysis of space perception and how visual cues, such as landmarks and sound, are perceived and impact people's behaviour while exploring a given outdoor space. The primary goal of the research is to investigate how auditory sensations and visual stimuli influence people's behaviour in outdoor built environments. Our technique compares people's perception of the built environment in different conditions: the real world and a replicated virtual world. As a case study, a university campus was used, and four experimental conditions were designed. The study followed a between-subjects design, and the data collection included gaze data acquired from an eye-tracking device as well as self-reports. The study concludes that sound influences human behaviour in such settings. More specifically conclusions are that: i) human behaviour in virtual replications of the real space, including both visual and sound stimuli, is tendentially more similar to human behaviour in the real world than in simulations omitting sound; and ii) there is a difference in human behaviour when people explore the same virtually replicated outdoor space, by varying the presence of sound. This study is particularly useful for researchers working on the comparison between human behaviour in virtual and real environments, related to visual and sound stimuli.