Academic BBS, or the Brown Bag Seminar, is an academic exchange initiative launched by the Tsinghua Urban Ergonomics Lab with support from many research groups. It serves young scholars committed to research and interested in developments at the frontiers of their fields. Sessions are held from time to time at the Urban Ergonomics Lab in the north wing of the Architecture Building at Tsinghua University.

How can interior design features at the microscale help us understand broader social change and urban development?

Advances in artificial intelligence and big data have made fine-grained, large-scale studies of urban space possible. They have opened up residential interiors, long regarded as highly private material environments closely bound to everyday life, to in-depth investigation. The design and morphology of residential interiors are jointly shaped by designers and residents, making them an important field for understanding patterns of human activity through the material environment.

In this session of Academic BBS, Yanhua Yao, a postdoctoral researcher and assistant research fellow at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, will take the paper Beijing’s urbanization reflected in apartment layouts: a computer vision and isovist analysis (1970–2020) as a starting point. She will explain how interior design features at the microscale can help us understand broader social change and urban development. Her presentation is entitled Large-Scale Research on the Design and Morphology of Urban Residential Interiors.□

About the speaker

Yanhua Yao completed her bachelor's and master's studies at the Bartlett School of Planning and the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, United Kingdom, and earned a PhD in design from the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University. She previously worked as a visiting doctoral student and research affiliate at the MIT Senseable City Lab in the United States. Her research focuses on urban residential interior morphology, interior decoration styles around the world, and contemporary urban material culture. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher and assistant research fellow at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, working with Professor Sai Ma on reforming design education in ways that reflect China's distinctive context.