Thesis Title: Interaction in Space: Artificial Intelligence Components in Public Environment
Supervisory Committee: Dr. Carmela Cucuzzella, Dr. Alice Jarry, Dr. Mohamed Ouf
INDI Program – 2021 Fall
Burcu Olgen is an Interior Designer and a PhD student in the Individualized Program at Concordia University. She has three years of Research and Teaching Assistant experience. She has a BA and MSc in Interior Architecture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her MSc thesis is focused on design-music relations by using music as a concept for form creation in interior design and architecture. Her previous publications and several conference participations on design theory, public environments, and spatial installations led Burcu to work on responsive components in space.
Currently, she is conducting interdisciplinary research on interactive public spaces through examination of responsive and behavioral elements operated by Artificial Intelligence. She seeks to investigate the subjects of spatial perception and movement in space from an AI perspective. Her study focuses on establishing smart systems that interact with humans to design interactive public spaces, and aims to find answers to the following questions: What would be derived from AI and machine learning to design interactive public spaces? How does
an interactive space learn from its users and influence them? How do AI and machine learning help to design ecological public environments? The main objective of her PhD thesis is reimagining public space in the scope of AI and machine learning, and how these technologies will develop in public space in an ecological and sustainable way. Her study will be a contribution to public space literature, and a key for ecological smart city transformation policies for governments. The preliminary methodology of her study follows the path of investigating human-space interaction by researching the relevant literature, establishing the relationship of smart elements and humans within the space, finally creating a model for interactive spatial design.