This doctoral thesis explores how place design may move towards human-inclusive place design, where neither the place nor the human are in the centre. The concept of humaninclusive place design, developed in this thesis, rather suggests a dynamic interplay between human- and place-centred perspectives. The rationale behind this aim is the observation that despite the ambitions to create pleasant places for people to live and spend time in, place design generally remains a rather place-centred activity. The problem with this is that the human experience of how places feel risks to be neglected. This means for example that techno-rational, functional features are put before human experiences. There is a tendency to design places prioritizing how they look rather than how they feel, everyday people tend to be left out, and the various professional tend to focus on their own areas of interest. Furthermore, the lack of post occupancy analysis in terms of human experience of the place means that the valuable knowledge on what is experienced as pleasant or not, gets lost. The afore-mentioned issues are in thesis understood as layered fragmented gaps that form complexities. Taking these complexities related to people, places and processes as the points of departure for making contributions towards human inclusive place design, this thesis applies a dialogue approach that brings theory and practice into dynamic conversation with each other. This allows for generating synergised learnings from various perspectives. The main theoretical perspectives include urban design, reflective practice, situational awareness, everyday aesthetics and affordances. The empirical material comes from collaborative processes, workshops and interviews with place design practitioners, everyday people and researchers.

In addition to the concept of human-inclusive place design, this thesis presents four interconnected results and contributions: (1) material and immaterial aspects of complexity related to people and places, (2) novel tools, defined as instruments of attentiveness for reflecting and sensing, (3) a general model for situational awareness in design and (4) a tentative taxonomy of affordances. The knowledge developed in this thesis strengthens the understanding of collaborative place design and designing by exploring the synergies between and within place and people to introduce concepts and tools to provide both practical and theoretical insights about what pleasant living environment can mean in a given context and how it may be created. It is proposed that through attentive analysis of the current situation, various material and immaterial perspectives can be discovered and utilised to inspire the participating actor’s thinking, doing, and sensing.