Acts, activity, worknet. Digital construction, Denmark 2007-09

Abstract

The original title, ’Virke i værknet’, is an almost poetic play words and therefore, difficult to translate. The Danish word ’virke’ refers to whether or not something or somebody works (verb) as well as to an activity (noun) in itself. The notion ’worknet’ is another piece of tricky language, however, a direct reference to Bruno Latour: As he says, worknet, rather than network, foregrounds the work that goes into constructing networks. Clarifying the title, however, also points to the substance, in that it is an exploration of the effects of heterogeneous actors’ acts. The activity, then, is digital construction, however, it is the co-emergence of users (inter alia architects, engineers), tools (applications, hardware), intelligent objects (virtual building blocks) and the 3D building information models (the architecture to become) that is explored and discussed. Based on studies of relations of work, empirical situations characterized by resistance to tools and applications, collapse of the building information model and high complexity related to e.g. so-called intelligent objects are presented to discuss effects of digitalization. In short, I ask: do human actors undertake the constraining logics of the non-human actors, the technology, to make digital construction look efficient or at least, stabilize the network. The number of work-arounds called for indicated this. Are the users facing a ’notion of lack’, in that models and virtual objects remain forever incomplete, continuously calling for attention. Information modelling requires technical perfection – at times the capacity of programming seems to trump that of designing buildings, the subtle outperforms the visual, you can’t fudge.