Escape from Winchester Mansion – Toward a Set of Design Principles to Master Complexity in IT Architectures

Although the management of complexity is a central task of CIOs and IT architects, in-depth examinations and the development of design theory in this area is, to the best of our knowledge, underrepresented in existing IS literature. Especially theory-based guidelines and information systems for the management of IT architecture complexity are missing. In a joint team of practitioners and researchers, we applied the action design research (ADR) method in order to tackle this class of problems, i.e., IT architecture complexity management. We derived a set of seven design principles (that guide the design of an information system that supports IT architects to manage IT architecture complexity), which we evaluated and enriched during multiple ‘building, intervention and evaluation’ cycles, according to ADR. In addition, we simultaneously implemented and evaluated a material artifact (i.e., a piece of software) for IT architecture complexity management

Monitoring the Complexity of IT Architectures: Design Principles and an IT Artifact

Monitoring the complexity of a firm’s IT architecture is imperative to ensure a stable and flexible platform foundation for competing in the era of digital business strategy. However, IT architects lack IT support for dealing with this important problem. We engaged with five companies in a significant design science research (DSR) program and drew on the heuristic theorizing framework both to solve this problem through evolving IT artifacts and to accumulate nascent design knowledge. We base the design knowledge development on a conceptual framework involving three essential concepts for understanding and solving this problem: structural complexity, dynamic complexity, and problem-solving complexity. Drawing on this foundation, we address the research question: How can IT support be provided for reducing the problem-solving complexity of monitoring the structural and dynamic complexity of IT architectures in the context of a digital business strategy? To answer this question, we present a set of design principles that we derived from our iterative process of IT artifact construction and evaluation activities with five companies. Our nascent design knowledge contributes to the research on IT architecture management in the context of digital business strategy. In addition, we also contribute to the understanding of how, through the use and illustration of the heuristic theorizing framework, design knowledge can be accumulated systematically on the basis of generalization from IT artifact construction and evaluation outcomes generated across multiple contexts and companies

The Mechanics of Enterprise Architecture Principles

Inspired by the city planning metaphor, enterprise architecture (EA) has gained considerable attention from academia and industry for systematically planning an IT landscape. Since EA is a relatively young discipline, a great deal of its work focuses on architecture representations (descriptive EA) that conceptualize the different architecture layers, their components, and relationships. Beside architecture representations, EA should comprise principles that guide architecture design and evolution toward predefined value and outcomes (prescriptive EA). However, research on EA principles is still very limited. Notwithstanding the increasing consensus regarding EA principles’ role and definition, the limited publications neither discuss what can be considered suitable principles, nor explain how they can be turned into effective means to achieve expected EA outcomes. This study seeks to strengthen EA’s extant theoretical core by investigating EA principles through a mixed methods research design comprising a literature review, an expert study, and three case studies. The first contribution of this study is that it sheds light on the ambiguous interpretation of EA principles in extant research by ontologically distinguishing between principles and nonprinciples, as well as deriving a set of suitable EA (meta-)principles. The second contribution connects the nascent academic discourse on EA principles to studies on EA value and outcomes. This study conceptualizes the “mechanics” of EA principles as a value-creation process, where EA principles shape the architecture design and guide its evolution and thereby realize EA outcomes. Consequently, this study brings EA’s underserved, prescriptive aspect to the fore and helps enrich its theoretical foundations

Anamersion: Toward a postcinematic poetics of immersion

The contribution of my practice-led research is the development of anamersion, a postcinematic poetics of immersion, which attends to the immersive conditions of contemporary life forms. Notions of mutational convergences of bodies, environments, and technologies and their differential mapping and navigation are developed in dialogue with Unica Zürn’s figuration of (her) (female) body and its institutionalisation as one formation in her illustrated text The House of Illnesses, Kathy Acker’s conception of the labyrinth as the site where codes are made flesh, and Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s explorations of trauma in their computer games set in horror mansions, with special attention to the way writing, drawing, and algorithmic operations often co-constitute each other in their works and in my own practice. Bringing these predominantly pre-computational engagements to bear on technology-dependent forms of immersion in gaming and virtual reality (VR), my practice-led research provides an analysis of immersive, navigational, and environmental figurations through modes of drawing, moving image, and multimedia installation that respond to Wynter’s call for a New Studia, and Zürn, Acker, and Heartscape’s disruptions of anatomical, architectural, and textual figurations on its own terms. Developing anamersion primarily with reference to Sylvia Wynter’s thought and, by extension, that of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Louis Chude-Sokei, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and others, emphasis is laid on the ways in which the over-represented genre of the human, Man, continues to manifest in and as bodies, environments, and technologies today. Understanding anamersion as a form of what Wynter calls figuration Work, anamersive approaches map, navigate, and traverse such generic structurations from the implicated and immersed positions, which have the potential to be in solidarity with the Wynterian unsettling of the genre Man by challenging conceptions of technology which carry over post-Enlightenment monohumanism into derivative posthumanisms, which continue to reproduce colonial logics with deadly consequences. Anamersion, as analytic and poetics, thus presents a significant and original contribution to the fields of artists’ moving-image and postcinematic studies, which focus on the environmental and navigational trajectories of moving-image and immersive technologies today and elaborates how these can be refigured to produce generative detachments and exits from the linear developmental narratives that underwrite a violent world order. KEYWORDS: anamersion, immersion, post-cinema, postcinematic, moving image, gaming, virtual reality, navigation, mapping, drawing, figuration, humanism, genre, environment, body, hybridity, technology, Sylvia Wynter, Kathy Acker, Unica Zürn, Porpentine Charity Heartscape

Shirley Jackson's House trilogy : domestic gothic and postwar architectural culture

Shirley Jackson’s House Trilogy: Domestic Gothic and Postwar Architectural Culture traite de la série de romans gothiques écrits par Shirley Jackson entre 1957 et 1962, de The Sundial à The Haunting of Hill House en passant par We Have Always Lived in the Castle. L’ouvrage situe son rapport au style gothique domestique dans le contexte du discours contemporain sur l’architecture et les formes de l’après-guerre. En particulier, cette étude fait valoir que sa trilogie « House » est une véritable intervention dans l’histoire de l’architecture et le discours domestique, Shirley Jackson utilisant une poétique gothique de l’espace pour évoquer la répétition spectrale des structures de pouvoir et de l’imaginaire idéologique liés à l’architecture. Grâce à son symbolisme architectural approfondi, elle explore la maison américaine et ses racines à travers les mythes et croyances les plus tenaces et les plus discordants du pays, suggérant que la maison elle-même, à la fois structure physique et symbole structurel, est un « fantôme » sociologique qui hante le projet domestique américain. L’auteure nous rappelle que l’architecture et la culture domestiques ne sont jamais neutres et que, bien plus qu’on ne l’a reconnu, sa fiction met en lumière les caractéristiques particulières des formes, des mouvements, des guerres de style et des discours architecturaux ayant activement contribué aux structures culturelles des genres, des classes et des races en Amérique. La carrière de Shirley Jackson, qui s’inscrit dans les deux décennies suivant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, coïncide avec le plus grand boom immobilier de l’histoire américaine, ainsi qu’avec l’une des périodes les plus expérimentales et les plus fébriles de l’architecture américaine. Pourtant, malgré les belles promesses et visions utopiques de cette époque, son architecture et sa culture domestique ont plutôt eu tendance à reproduire les structures de pouvoir oppressives du passé, qu’il s’agisse des normes de genre étouffantes de la maison familiale des années 1950 ou de la ségrégation dans les banlieues. Les maisons de madame Jackson se veulent des allégories gothiques de ce milieu et de sa structure temporelle « fantomatique », marquées par la routine et les revirements angoissants. Chacune des maisons de sa trilogie témoigne de ce que l’on pourrait appeler une « historicité hybride », évoluant à la fois vers le passé et vers l’avenir à travers l’architecture et le discours domestique américains. Dans les manoirs des années glorieuses et les constructions gothiques victoriennes de ses romans, l’auteure satirise l’architecture d’après-guerre et son futur nostalgique, suggérant que les maisons du présent restent hantées par les fantômes du passé. Contrairement à l’architecture de son époque, qui prétendait avoir banni ces fantômes, Shirley Jackson ne cherche pas à échapper aussi facilement aux spectres de l’histoire américaine et de l’assujettissement qui s’y rattache. Plutôt, elle entreprend de les affronter. Pour ce faire, elle pénètre dans la « maison hantée » de l’architecture et de la domesticité américaine : elle l’explore, l’examine, l’interroge et, finalement, la brûle, la met en pièces et la reconstruit.Shirley Jackson’s House Trilogy: Domestic Gothic and Postwar Architectural Culture considers Shirley Jackson’s suite of gothic novels written between 1957 and 1962, from The Sundial to The Haunting of Hill House to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It places her treatment of the Domestic Gothic alongside the actual architecture and design discourse of her postwar moment. In particular, it argues that her House Trilogy constitutes an intervention within architectural history and domestic discourse, with Jackson using a gothic poetics of space to suggest the spectral repetition of architecture’s structures of power and ideological imaginary. Through her extensive architectural symbolism, she probes the American house and its roots within the country’s most abiding myths and divisive beliefs, suggesting that the house itself, as both a physical structure and structuring symbol, is a sociological “ghost” that haunts the American domestic project. Jackson reminds us that domestic architecture and culture are never neutral and that, much more so than has been acknowledged, her fiction excavates the specific design features, movements, style wars, and architectural discourses which actively participated in the cultural constructions of gender, class, and race in America. Her writing career — from her first major publication in 1943 to her untimely death in 1965 — coincides with the largest housing boom in American history, as well as one of the most experimental and anxious periods in American architecture. And yet despite the era’s broad promises and utopian visions, its architecture and domestic culture tended to reproduce the oppressive power structures of the past, from the stifling gender norms of the 1950s family home to the segregated suburb. Jackson’s houses are gothic allegories of this milieu and its “ghostly” time structure of uncanny repetition and return. Each of the houses in her trilogy exhibits what might be called a “hybrid historicity,” gesturing at once backwards and forwards through American architecture and domestic discourse. Inside the Gilded Age mansions and Victorian Gothic piles of her novels, Jackson satirizes postwar architecture and its nostalgic futures, suggesting how the houses of the present remain haunted by the ghosts of the past. Unlike the architecture of her time, which claimed to have banished these ghosts, Jackson does not seek to escape the spectres of American history and subjecthood so easily. Instead, she endeavours to face them. In order to do so, she enters the “haunted house” of American architecture and domesticity itself — exploring it, examining it, interrogating it, and, eventually, burning it down, tearing it apart, and remaking it

Londres, capitale du post-modernisme?:Transformations des modèles et des pratiques de l'architecture dans la culture britannique à la fin du XXe siècle

The advantage of the dynamism of the London architectural scene seems rather ignored by historians and theorists. Not only is London absent from the grand narrative of modernity, but it is also denied the status of avant-garde, although since the 1960s, the British capital has been one of the main testing grounds of the renewal of forms and architectural ideas. The emergence of the of notion âpost-modernismâ at the turn of 1970s, initiated within the London specialized publishing, confirms this central role. This theoretical notion was created by the historian Charles Jencks (whose professor was Reyner Banham, initiator of the New Brutalism with Alison and Peter Smithson) as an alternative to modernism. It has transformed the architectural scene by establishing the return of historicism, the great moral taboo of a modernity based essentially on functionalism. This theoretical revolution, however, did not occur without causing grotesque postures, fueling a debate exacerbated and soon disrupted by the controversial speech of Prince Charles, who became the spokesman of the traditionalists. The impact in the media of this âpost-modern affairâ has led to believe in the manifestation of a crisis of legitimacy and of reception for the work of architects, in the context of heated debates concerning the cancellations of three major architectural and urban planning competitions for the capital city â the extension of the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, the No.1 Poultry programme in the City, the redesigning of Paternoster Square near St Paulâs Cathedral. Yet, this intense sequence of the reappraisal of modernism has not curbed the development of an innovative and a radical architecture. On the contrary, it has led to the deregulation of the modern discourse by problematizing the architectâs responsibility in the creation of the built environment and by forcing to reconsider the challenges of integrating radicalism in a located environment. In this, âpost-modernismâ questions the foundations and the revival of a specifically British culturalist approach, as an alternative to the progressive model that has guided the idea and the act of modernity

Night moves: A mise-en-scene of a luminous economy

Since the general electrification of ambient urban lighting in the late nineteenth century, complex arrangements of functional and aesthetic lighting have become increasingly deployed to intensify the capitalization of the city at night. Contemporary solid-state lighting integrated with networked control systems means that scenic effects once contained within theatrical and cinematic production, have infiltrated the built spaces that we occupy. As digital imaging technologies converge with the built environment, the city at night can be considered as a moving image. This research considers the implications of the nocturnal city when it is understood as a manufactured atmosphere, where the distinctions between media interfaces and the construction of urban space are no longer distinguishable as distinct zones of experience. By employing Bertolt Brecht’s and Antonin Artaud’s concepts of a mise-en-scene of light as a critical and transformational tool, the thesis develops connections between current theories of atmosphere and post-cinematic urbanism. The thesis proposes a practice-based analytical and critical mise-en-sce ne that draws on embodied empirical methods for creating lens, light and sound-based artworks within installation art and the urban environment. This research explores the effects of light and digital projection on urban subjectivity and its representations. Recent formulations of atmosphere in Gernot Böhme’s phenomenological conception of architectural atmospheres and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ theorisation of lawscape are integrated into a broader corpus of analysis and theory through empirical, theoretical and historical modes of enquiry. Together, the written thesis and body of practice provide the framework phototropia. This aims to establish a transversal platform for critical thought and practice from which to think and remake the city at night. From the perspective of a material practice this method offers ways of understanding the changing relations between imaging technologies and contemporary urban subjectivity

Digitizing Citizen Energy Communities : A Platform Engineering Approach

Low acceptance and protests against the increasing expansion of renewable generation capacities by local citizens have repeatedly slowed down the ongoing energy transition in western countries. A promising approach to address this issue is the energy community concept, for which the European Union introduced a regulatory framework within the \u27Directive on common rules for the internal market for electricity\u27. It refers to them communities as Citizen Energy Communities. Within these communities, participants can exchange locally generated energy and the community can be represented by a digital platform, which organizes the community\u27s continuous power distribution and financial flows. In the academic literature, these communities are discussed as a tool to actively integrate citizens into the energy system on a local level. They increase the acceptance by benefiting the local value chain and empower the energy sector\u27s decarbonization. However, there is a lack of research on how Citizen Energy Communities can be implemented in practice and how they perform under real-world conditions. This dissertation’s contribution addresses the empirical challenges in the implementation and long-term operating of Citizen Energy Communities. The thesis reports on six studies. In the first study, the necessary IT architecture and digital building blocks are developed based on a literature review and insights from a real-world implementation for Citizen Energy Communities are described. From the resulting experiences, requirements for the individual building blocks and technologies are deducted. Researchers propose that blockchain technology can accelerate the introduction of Citizen Energy Communities. Therefore, a maturity model for blockchain-based Citizen Energy Community projects is established in the subsequent study, which allows assessing the development status of field implementations and identifying necessary next steps. In the third study, a platform-based allocation mechanism is designed, which addresses heterogeneous preferences of participants and thus enables local prices for different local energy sources. Based on an implementation, the mechanism\u27s performance and functionality are evaluated. Besides the technical functionality, user behavior is of central importance for success. Therefore, seven user interface design principles are deducted in the fourth study based on a structured design science research process with the help of expert interviews and a behavioral laboratory experiment. In the fifth study, it is quantified and evaluated if participants are regularly active within the community, willing to pay premium prices for local renewable sources and whether they are responsive to local price signals as often assumed in the literature. The results show that Citizen Energy Communities need to be tested more thoroughly and that the platform\u27s allocation mechanism require a low complexity or additional support systems like automated agents. As a result, the sixth study evaluates the real-world trading performance of automated agents and their impact on the platform market. The results show that a single agent among human traders can minimize the participant\u27s cost. However, this advantage diminishes with the number of additional automated agents in the market. The thesis is concluded with an outlook and pathway for future research

Game | World | Architectonics

In its current digital, pictorial and viral ubiquity, architecture no longer has to be bodily present, but has a mediating role. As a medial hinge it folds different disciplines of media and art onto the realm of the everyday. Here, the idea of architectonics can be understood as the architectural implications of computer games in a broader sense to address the matter of architecture in game worlds as well as the architecture of computer games themselves. This anthology bundles transdisciplinary approaches around the topics of space, architecture, perception of and worldbuilding in computer games and their media-specific properties. The aim is to show how and under which aspects digital game worlds are constituted. The contributions depart from the beaten tracks of media and game studies, focusing on spatial, architectural and world-shaped phenomena within current digital media culture.In ihrer aktuellen digitalen, bildlichen wie auch viralen Ubiquität muss Architektur nicht mehr körperlich präsent sein und doch füllt sie eine vermittelnde Rolle aus. Als mediales Scharnier verschränkt sie unterschiedliche Disziplinen der Medien und Künste mit der Alltagswirklichkeit. Das Konzept der Architektonik umschreibt hierbei in weitem Sinne die architektonischen Implikationen der Computerspiele, um Architektur in Spielwelten als auch die Architektur der Computerspiele selbst greifbar zu machen. Dieser Sammelband bündelt transdisziplinäre Zugriffe rund um die Themen Raum, Architektur, Wahrnehmung von und Weltenbau in Computerspielen und deren medienspezifischen Eigenschaften. Ziel ist es aufzuzeigen, wie und unter welchen Aspekten sich digitale Spielwelten konstituieren. Die Beiträge verlassen dabei ausgetretene Pfade von Medienwissenschaft und Game Studies und fokussieren auf die räumlichen, architektonischen und weltförmigen Phänomene aktueller digitaler Medienkultur

METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION

We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively. Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness, speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city