الفهرس 
User-Centered Design (UCD)Only 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
For decades, understanding user needs and behavior has been regarded as a critical issue that must be considered in product design, giving rise to the term ”user-centered design (UCD),” which is defined as a cycle that starts from the beginning of any design process to its end. User-centered design is all about involving the user at the heart of a product, system, or process. The UCD approach has dominated the industrial sector and is swiftly affecting most modern products. However, UCD appears to have been developed and established at a slower rate in the field of architectural design, particularly in large-scale public buildings such as organizations, schools, university buildings, and so on, because of two factors. First, designers do not meet with end-users early in the design process. Second, architects and other essential participants in the spatial design process, such as interior designers, engineers, and others, have traditionally been trained in the functional and aesthetic conditions that form the building as a structure. As a result, it is necessary to define a clear methodology or framework for integrating UCD into architectural design, especially for public buildings that serve a diverse range of end-users. The main aim of this thesis is to promote a new integrated approach for enhancing the user-centered design process in designing and retrofitting spaces in public buildings to meet the needs of end-users. This innovative approach focuses on the impact of the built environment on the user’s emotional state during the early design stage. This approach will include two types of new integrated UCD methods: emotion assessment methods and computer-generated architectural visualization methods. Furthermore, this approach will follow user-centered design principles, which focus on improving end-users’ emotional reactions. To accomplish this, we will use architectural visualization technologies to present design proposals to end-users in the early design stage and measure their emotional responses to these proposals. In this study, the Farsi lecture hall at Alexandria University’s Faculty of Engineering was chosen for a redesign. The adopted methodology is based on conducting primary and secondary research to better understand the needs of architecture students (end-users). Six design proposals were presented to the students, who rated them on a 5-point Likert scale to determine the optimum one. The final stage of this study attempts to quantify the students’ emotional state concerning the optimum proposal through self-reporting measures (a selfassessment manikin and a 5-point Likert scale) and physiological measures (mobile brain/heart imaging (EEG, HRV)). During the three-minute presentation, the students navigated a 360° panoramic view on a laptop screen while wearing an EEG headband that recorded their EEG and HRV. Furthermore, the students assessed their emotional state using a self-assessment manikin and a 5-point Likert scale. The findings of this study revealed that using the parameters of interior UCD reduced stress; 50% of students felt no stress with the optimum proposal. Besides, the valence (positive emotion) of the optimum UCD proposal is enhanced, as 41.7% felt very positive emotions and 50% felt positive emotions. There is a significant relationship between the results of self-reporting measures and physiological measures. Therefore, the new integrated UCD framework enhances design quality and enduser satisfaction.