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TopOur society is undergoing a major digitalization - not at least in the field of architecture. The digitalization of our built environment has also begun to reflect itself in research (see e.g., Cai & Abascal, 2006; Margolis & Robinson, 2007; Greenfield, 2006). At the same time, the digital is increasingly becoming a natural architectural element (Greenberg, 2006; Wiberg, 2011). As the digital gets integrated in our built environment, typically addressed as ambient computing, it creates and enables new functionality for buildings, new opportunities for building construction, and new architectural expressions. With this development follows that the digital is neither possible nor meaningful to separate from the social, the physical, and the material world. Rather, we find meaning inn texturized and working compositions made up of physical, digital and social elements (for a further discussion see e.g., Robles & Wiberg, 2010; Wiberg & Robles, 2010; Wiberg, 2011).
For the research program “architectural informatics” as presented in this paper this is a guiding vision in which no categorical distinction is made between the physical and the digital in the first place. On the contrary, the physical, the digital and the social is now to a large extent integrated in our everyday lives. The history of informatics research shows that with full clarity. People shape digital technology and the digital technology is shaping us. Several concepts have over the years succeeded each other in informatics research to make this point. ‘Socio-technical systems’ (Hirschheim & Klein, 1989) was one of the first concepts formulated to point to the fact that technical and social systems are fundamentally inseparable and as such constituting a socio-technical materiality. The concept of a “duality of technology” (Orlikowski, 1992) was further developed as a concept aimed at describing the relationship between the social and the technical world. When the complete fusion of the physical and digital occur, there is no point in further distinguish these elements. This knowledge led to the development of the present concept of ‘sociomateriality’ (Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) or simply ‘materiality’ (Leonardi & Barley, 2008) aimed at highlighting how social practices relate to the material in our increasingly digitalized society.
In the modern society our built environment and our digital reality are increasingly defining our social, cultural and professional everyday lives. With this as a point of departure a number of researchers in recent years have stressed the importance of closer interdisciplinary collaboration between the fields of architecture and IT research (see e.g., Streitz et al., 2002, p. 555; Jones et al., 2005; Sengers et al., 2004). Despite this obvious fact, very little has been done in order to build strong research on an integrative approach of the two areas (Mitchell, 2000; McCullough, 2004; Wiberg, 2005). The research agenda as presented in this paper is an attempt to contribute to this need.