Book review: disrupt this! MOOCs and the promise of technology by Karen Head

In Disrupt This! MOOCs and the Promise of Technology, Karen Head draws on a 'view from inside' of developing and teaching a first-year writing massive open online course (MOOC) to critically interrogate the claim that such technology will fundamentally ‘disrupt’ educational structures. This is an eloquent and intricate analysis that shows how personal experience and practice can add nuance to questions regarding the egalitarian potential of MOOCs, writes Yana Boeva

Book review: unreal objects: digital materialities, technoscientific projects and political realities by Kate O'Riordan

In Unreal Objects: Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities, Kate O’Riordan explores how emerging and future technologies such as in vitro meat and fitness trackers are ‘unreal objects’ that are shaped and brought into being through the media and often hidden networks of financial investment. In inviting readers to think critically about the discourses and material structures behind technological hype, this book is an excellent analysis of the role of mediation in constructing visions of technoscience, recommends Yana Boeva. Unreal Objects: Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities. Kate O’Riordan. Pluto Press. 2017

Break, Make, Retake: Interrogating the Social and Historical Dimensions of Making as a Design Practice

Making and digital fabrication technologies are the focus of bold promises. Among the most tempting are that these activities and processes require little initial skill, knowledge, and expertise. Instead, they enable their acquisition, opening them up to everyone. Makerspaces and fab labs would blur the identities between professional and amateur, designer and engineer, maker and hacker, ushering in a broad-based de-professionalization. Prototyping and digital fabrication would unite design and manufacturing in ways that resemble and revive traditional craftwork. These activities and processes promise the reindustrialization of places where manufacturing has disappeared. These promises deploy historical categories and conditionsexpertise, design, craft production, manufacturing, post- industrial urbanismwhile claiming to transform them. This dissertation demonstrates how these proposals and narratives rely on imaginaries in which countercultural practices become mainstream by presenting a threefold argument. First, making and digital fabrication sustain supportive environments that reconfigure contemporary design practice. Second, making and digital fabrication simultaneously reshape the categories of professional, amateur, work, leisure, and expertise; but not always in the ways its proponents suggest. Third, as making and digital fabrication propagate, they reproduce traditional practices and values, negating much of their countercultural and alternative capacities. The dissertation supports these claims through a multi-sited and multinational ethnographic investigation of the historical and social effects of making and digital fabrication on design practice and the people and places enacting. The study lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and design research. In addressing the argument throughout this scholarship, it explores three central themes: (1) the idea that making and digital fabrication lead to instant materialization of design while re-uniting design with manufacturing; (2) the amount of skill and expertise expected for participation in these practices and how these are encoded in rhetoric and in practice; and (3) the material and social infrastructures that configure making as a design practice. The dissertation demonstrates that that the perceived marginality of making, maker cultures, digital fabrication allows for its bolder promises to thrive invisibly by concealing other social issues, while the societal contributions of this technoculture say something different on the surface

Die Übersetzung des Bauwissens und ihre versteckten Konflikte

Das Bauwesen gilt aufgrund seiner Fragmentierung als ein Nachzügler der Digitalisierung. Große Bauunternehmen und Regierungen erhoffen sich aber dadurch erhebliche Verbesserungen der Effizienz und Transparenz in Bauprozessen sowie eine Bewältigung der Wohnungskrise. Als ein wichtiger Treiber gilt die verbindliche Einführung von Building Information Modeling (BIM), ein digitales 3D-Modell für alle Phasen des Bauwerks. Dieses Modell liefert Informationen nicht nur zum planerischen Entwurf und allen Gewerken, sondern auch zu Qualitäten, dem Projektablauf und den Kosten (bis zum Betrieb). Gerade dieser Ansatz verursacht bei vielen Architekt/-innen und Baubetrieben Zurückhaltung aufgrund von Schnittstellenproblemen und offenen Fragen zum geistigen Eigentum, zur Verantwortungs- und Haftungszuschreibung sowie zur Flexibilität im Bauprozess. Es gibt viele weitere Digitalisierungsstrategien. Für den Entwurf zielen sie zum Beispiel auf die maximale Ausschöpfung der Computerleistung für die bauliche Performance und die Integration diverser Anforderungen in einer kybernetischen Tradition oder loten die Grenzen des formal und technisch Machbaren mit ikonischen Gebäuden aus (computational design/parametric design). Auf der Baustelle sollen technisch die Potenziale einer Roboterisierung und Automatisierung der Bauarbeit oder organisatorisch die Potenziale digitalisierter Projektabläufe und des Datenaustauschs bis hin zu Bauplattform(ökonomi)en erschlossen werden. Jede Nutzung digitaler Möglichkeiten setzt eine Übersetzung der verschiedenen, soziologisch ungleichen, fragmentierten und implizit vorliegenden Wissensbestände in digitalisierte Informationsverständnisse voraus. Die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie betont, dass Übersetzung immer auch Verrat ist. Das gilt auch hier und ist den beteiligten Akteuren zumindest teilweise bewusst. Rollen werden zwischen Menschen, Computern und Robotern neu verteilt, Steuerungs- und Handlungsspielräume definiert, Ungleichheiten zementiert, Parameter und Handlungszwänge geschaffen. Mit unserem Beitrag möchten wir die Spannungen auf Basis der empirischen Forschung im Exzellenzcluster „Integratives computerbasiertes Planen und Bauen für die Architektur (IntCDC)“ herausarbeiten und in den Kontext übergeordneter Macht- und Konfliktstrukturen der Automatisierung einordnen

Alternative Histories in DIY Cultures and Maker Utopias

Introduction editorial article to the Special Issue of Digital Culture & Society 'Alternative Histories in DIY Cultures and Maker Utopias', volume 6, issue 1, 2020. https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/DCS/htmlNon peer reviewe

From Digital Design to Data-Assets: Competing Visions, Policy Projects, and Emerging Arrangements of Value Creation in the Digital Transformation of Construction

The construction sector faces multiple challenges such as poor productivity, performance, and competitiveness and has a huge share in global waste production, CO2 emissions, and resource depletion. In this situation, a broad range of public and private stakeholders place their hopes on the digitalisation of construction, in particular, building information modelling (BIM). The article seeks to destabilise the notion of "the" digitalisation in a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. First, we map out the landscape of digital visions regarding the future of construction by examining pertinent academic, public, and professional discourses in recent years. We identify a vision of industrialised construction, a vision of data-based integration, a vision of singularised architecture, a vision of digital sustainability, and an emerging vision of the "twin green and digital transition." In a diachronic perspective, we zoom in to UK "BIM-and-beyond" policy from 2011 to 2021 and show how BIM has evolved from a digital design tool into a critical component for building a national system of data-assets for data-based value creation. In both perspectives, we see a recurring storyline according to which the sector will solve all its problems if it only undertakes the digital transformation

Knowing in Algorithmic Regimes. An Introduction.

Egbert S, Jarke J, Bianca P, Hendrik H, Boeva Y. Knowing in Algorithmic Regimes. An Introduction. . In: Jarke J, Prietl B, Egbert S, Boeva Y, Arnold M, eds. Algorithmic Regimes: Interactions, Politics, and Methods. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; In Press

Algorithmic Regimes

Jarke J, Prietl B, Egbert S, Boeva Y, Heuer H, Arnold M, eds. Algorithmic Regimes. Digital Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Draft

Algorithmic Futures. Governmentality and Prediction Regimes

Egbert S. Algorithmic Futures. Governmentality and Prediction Regimes . In: Jarke J, Prietl B, Egbert S, Boeva Y, Heuer H, Arnold M, eds. Algorithmic Regimes. Digital Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Draft