Our research emphasizes active participation, engaging stakeholders through participatory (action) research, co-design, often resorting to the innovative use of games as tools for design, teaching, and research.
Participation is considered as an important element of urban and landscape planning, involving stakeholders through participatory (action research), co-design, and utilizing games as tools for co-design, teaching and research. We have produced International Union of Architects awarded game ‘Spector – The Sustainability Inspector’ and a primer in the filed ‘The Routledge Companion to Games in Architecture and Urban Planning’.
Another important area of research is contributing to Baukultur by built environment education and spatial pedagogy, which incorporate educational activities related to cultural, arts, democratic, and environmental education using facets of the built environment. This aims to develop critical thinking about spatial issues, foster environmental stewardship, and inform participatory decision-making processes.
Spatial agency and activism are also significant aspects of Land Lab’s research. This involves studying space and spatiality as cultural dimensions and focusing on politically engaged projects where design is used as a means to pursue specific socio-political objectives, emphasizing architects, urbanists, and planners as facilitators of social change.
Spatial research methods at our lab combine social sciences and creative research methods through context-based design projects, post-occupancy evaluation, and visual research methods. The overarching motivation behind these research strands is to design and research not for, but with people across generations, ensuring that spatial solutions are sustainable, inclusive, contextually relevant and reflective of the needs of their users.