Tim Heath
University of Nottingham, Architecture and the Built Environment, Faculty Member
This paper mainly explores the research scope of the impact of a child-friendly campus landscape on children's learning and social behavior, adopts a mixed research method combining qualitative and quantitative research, and selects... more
This paper mainly explores the research scope of the impact of a child-friendly campus landscape on children's learning and social behavior, adopts a mixed research method combining qualitative and quantitative research, and selects two primary schools with different landscape characteristics in HeZe City, China as research objects and conducts a comparative study on them. The research data obtained by the comparison show that the child-friendly campus environment can stimulate students' interest in learning and promote interpersonal communication among students. However, the child-friendly campus landscape also has certain limitations, which will be further expanded and improved in future studies.
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Based on a perspective that creating a themed experience can strengthen the distinctiveness of a consumer destination and thereby attract tourists through purposeful interactions, this paper concentrates upon the theoretical model of... more
Based on a perspective that creating a themed experience can strengthen the distinctiveness of a consumer destination and thereby attract tourists through purposeful interactions, this paper concentrates upon the theoretical model of creating a themed experience. The paper examines the visiting experience displayed on social media within the proposed theoretical structure, through an innovative approach, which combines content analysis with image analysis. The case studies are conducted in two Chinese “consumer destinations.” The findings enhance the understanding of visitor experiences and improve the process of creating a themed experience.
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Research Interests: Mathematics and Routledge
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Virtual reality (VR) technology has the potential to revolutionize public engagement in the design of urban projects, leading to more sustainable and inclusive environments. This research scrutinizes this potential through a study of... more
Virtual reality (VR) technology has the potential to revolutionize public engagement in the design of urban projects, leading to more sustainable and inclusive environments. This research scrutinizes this potential through a study of elevated urban spaces, specifically the Sky Garden and Crossrail Place in London. Comparing real and virtual interactions, the aim is to highlight their differences and similarities while underscoring the importance of design decision-making for sustainable public places. Through walk-along interviews with 33 visitors in each space and a VR experiment with a separate group of 33 participants, the study analyses the effectiveness of VR as a co-design tool. The outcomes demonstrate that VR positively influences user involvement and allows for the production and real-time testing of design alternatives. Significantly, the majority of participants, who had not physically visited the spaces, could identify design concerns and propose potential activities and...
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The concept of process is an important one. It means that a set of factors or elements, when put together, form an action that produces certain results. If you remove one of the factors or elements, the action stops or changes... more
The concept of process is an important one. It means that a set of factors or elements, when put together, form an action that produces certain results. If you remove one of the factors or elements, the action stops or changes significantly and the results are no longer the same. Examples of processes include a tennis game, a machine, a factory, etc. Human Communication is a process! It is made up of several interdependent elements or factors. If one fails, they all fail. Interdependency is one of the characteristics of all processes. Begins the communication or has the major responsibility for developing and communicating the ideas. 2. Message (Language): Message made up of symbols that must be known by the receiver 3. Receiver (Listener): Takes in and makes sense out of the messages of the speaker (decoding), and then lets the sender know what he/she feels, thinks, or believes about the message. 4. Environment: Time, place, occasion, etc. This affects the nature and the quality of...
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Purpose: This paper investigates the potential of virtual reality (VR) technologies—specifically, building information modeling (BIM) (“Autodesk Revit”) and game engines (“Unreal Engine”)—to enhance public involvement in the design and... more
Purpose: This paper investigates the potential of virtual reality (VR) technologies—specifically, building information modeling (BIM) (“Autodesk Revit”) and game engines (“Unreal Engine”)—to enhance public involvement in the design and execution of architecture and urban projects. The main research question focuses on comparing the effectiveness of these two methods in creating an interactive design model for participatory design in public spaces. Methods: The study employed a VR exploratory experiment with 33 participants, followed by semi-structured interviews to analyze two recent developments in London: the Sky Garden, and Crossrail Place Roof Garden. Participants interacted with the design models and provided feedback on their experiences. Results: The findings demonstrate that integrating VR with BIM software using the Enscape plugin effectively enhances user involvement, enabling real-time generation and testing of design alternatives. While both methods were found to be bene...
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ix, 394 p. : col. ill. ; 28 cm
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Urban regeneration has become one of the most effective ways to develop urban areas that have declined. Compared with other types of urban regeneration, community micro-regeneration is characterised by scattered stakeholders. Existing... more
Urban regeneration has become one of the most effective ways to develop urban areas that have declined. Compared with other types of urban regeneration, community micro-regeneration is characterised by scattered stakeholders. Existing studies on public participation in community micro-regeneration mainly focus on revealing the interaction between different stakeholders with less attention to the main users’ social profiles in their participation process. This paper explores residents’ social profiles influencing their participation in community micro-regeneration projects in China. An evaluation framework for residents’ participation in community micro-regeneration projects is designed through literature research, the Delphi technique, and an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) based on the case study of Yongtai community, Guangzhou. Relative residents’ social profiles with the data from the questionnaire and literature research are further verified by stepwise linear regression. The r...
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China’s new-type urbanisation, as a national strategy, is one of the reasons why the leap in development has been made in the last decade. Existing studies mainly focus on the status and outcomes of china’s new-type urbanisation while... more
China’s new-type urbanisation, as a national strategy, is one of the reasons why the leap in development has been made in the last decade. Existing studies mainly focus on the status and outcomes of china’s new-type urbanisation while stressing not enough the overlooked aspects of new-type urbanisation policies that are currently in use. This paper aims at exploring the highlighted and overlooked aspects of policies of three key elements in China’s new-type urbanisation: population, land, and industry and their implementations. The complicated process and contradictions between formulation and implementation of the policies are extracted by analysing set goals and implemented situations of relative indicators from the three elements. The policies drove the population from separation to unity between household registered and actual residences, land from human land allometry to balance, and industry from traditional industrialisation to emerging service. Although these policies had si...
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This research focuses upon the socio-environmental dimensions and urban identity of urban environments by evaluating human behaviours and space-to-human relations. In addition, approaches to urban re-branding will be analysed to evaluate... more
This research focuses upon the socio-environmental dimensions and urban identity of urban environments by evaluating human behaviours and space-to-human relations. In addition, approaches to urban re-branding will be analysed to evaluate the role of engineered identities in enhancing social integration. This particular study will focus upon the installation of temporary activities into the public realm and the impact that these can have upon perception, identity and activity within public spaces. A case study of temporary markets taking place in Nottingham’s Old Market Square in the UK will be evaluated to explore possibilities of maximising the potential of urban space. Keywords: human behaviour, urban identity, spatial inter-relation, socio-environmental © 2017. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under respons...
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The experiments implemented in this research demonstrate that people who navigate an urban environment using GPS have poorer landmark knowledge than those who do not use GPS. Furthermore, discriminant analysis reveals certain attributes... more
The experiments implemented in this research demonstrate that people who navigate an urban environment using GPS have poorer landmark knowledge than those who do not use GPS. Furthermore, discriminant analysis reveals certain attributes of urban landmarks that GPS users rely on for memory of urban place. The research also examines the reasons for poor landmark knowledge amongst GPS users and this is discussed from the perspectives of different disciplines. Finally, the paper analyses how the findings of this study can inform urban design and enable greater cognitive engagement of GPS users with urban environments by enabling them to develop greater landmark and spatial knowledge of place.
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Since the late 1980s, historic urban quarters have emerged as a focus of many conservation and regeneration eff orts. Clearly these important areas of cities have an endowed identity and character but have usually lost any economic... more
Since the late 1980s, historic urban quarters have emerged as a focus of many conservation and regeneration eff orts. Clearly these important areas of cities have an endowed identity and character but have usually lost any economic viability and new activities and sense of place needs to be created. This paper will outline how urban design and planning needs to draw upon the local context to inform new design and thereby achieve a continuity of local character, historic fabric and street patt ern. The paper argues that new design in historic urban – quarters should respect context in its eff orts to breathe new life into these historic legacies. A long-term and sustainable revitalization that involves physical renewal complemented by new economic activity is also advocated to create a new sense of place that builds upon a quarter’s physical, socio-cultural and economic dimensions.
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This paper presents the early stages of a PhD research which attempts to analyze the effect of using digital mobile devices on the process of city imaging in The Information Era. Within this process, some guidelines are suggested in order... more
This paper presents the early stages of a PhD research which attempts to analyze the effect of using digital mobile devices on the process of city imaging in The Information Era. Within this process, some guidelines are suggested in order to facilitate the design of the physical urban environment as well as the design of technologies with location-based systems and navigators.
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Built environment designers have intuitively known the value of design decisions on the quality of human experiences. Social and behavioural scientists have added to this a body of research that increases the understanding on how design... more
Built environment designers have intuitively known the value of design decisions on the quality of human experiences. Social and behavioural scientists have added to this a body of research that increases the understanding on how design impacts these experiences. As culture is considered to be the way people do things in a certain place, much of cultural studies consider physical environment as tangible and persistent artefact with which building’s users continuously interact. The built-environment is at once the context for behaviour, and influence the behaviour. Culture is said to be powerful and persistent. Sustainable environmental design- as a discipline concerned with balancing the built environment with its context- is commonly based on integrating the most efficient and cost-effective sustainable technologies, some designer integrates passive and active environmental design solutions, if adequate. Whereas, to a great extent, the choices of environmental solutions alternative...
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The physical environment has started to be taken into consideration in mobile human– computer interaction more and more in order to bring humans and computers closer together. These studies focus on merging the aspects of actual... more
The physical environment has started to be taken into consideration in mobile human– computer interaction more and more in order to bring humans and computers closer together. These studies focus on merging the aspects of actual situations in real world into the information delivered by mobile devices. These studies have helped to develop the computer-based technologies toward considering more human factors by adopting the principles of the physical environment. There is now a large body of research presenting how urban planning principles are applied to the design of virtual environments. For instance, Kevin Lynch‟s theories from “Image of the City” (1960) have been widely implemented in designing virtual cities and particularly navigation systems. Navigation systems use the design fundamentals which are initiated and developed by urban planners and environmental psychologist. However, there has to date been little study in the opposite direction; analysing the effects of digital t...
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The increasing concern for a sustainable development and the significance it should have on future waterfront, places urban design - with its key concern for contextual integration – in a uniquely important position. One of the main... more
The increasing concern for a sustainable development and the significance it should have on future waterfront, places urban design - with its key concern for contextual integration – in a uniquely important position. One of the main factors in contextual integration is the morphological evolution of the place. This paper focuses upon the case study analysing the morphology of Kuala Lumpur waterfront by adopting the method developed by Conzen (1960). Three significant periods of the waterfront development were examined and through this, nineteen waterfront treatments were identified which are suggested vital to be ackowledged for future decision making on the Kuala Lumpur waterfront.