TU Delft Open Access Journals
Not a member yet
3113 research outputs found
Sort by
Factors that influence the dominance of an enterprise reference architecture: A comparative case study
Get PDFReference architectures provide template solutions for particular domains and can therefore be considered as standards. This study investigates whether diversity in enterprise reference architectures is likely to continue or if one reference architecture will gain dominance in the market. More specifically, we examine factors that lead to market dominance. We use the literature on standards battles, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework to analyse factors for dominance. In this field, network effects apply and provide a force towards the dominance of a single architecture. However, factors contributing to multiple standards are more relevant, as well as those from TAM and TOE, since reference architectures differ slightly in their added value for various categories of stakeholders.
Empirical data from 19 expert interviews provide further insights into the factors that influence the dominance of an enterprise reference architecture. Our results show that it is important that the content and value of reference architectures are straightforward and understandable, not only for architects but for all stakeholders. We extend current standards battles literature by applying it to a new area and combining it with TAM and TOE. We provide an innovative and extensive list of factors that influence the dominance of one standard and the continued coexistence of multiple standards and relate these to phases of technology development. This list can form a framework for future standards battle research.
From the practical perspective, the annex may help parties involved in standard battles to position themselves in the technology development phase, better predict the outcome of the battle, and enhance the possibility to influence that outcome. More specifically, our paper will help adopters of enterprise reference architectures to make better-informed choices. Suppliers of reference architectures can use the findings to stimulate market adoption of their model
The Oil is Dying? Long Live its "Heritage"! The Refining of Legal Systems and Port-Cities’ Planning
Get PDFOil is a dangerous product. Its transport, storage and refining present numerous environmental and health challenges. Local, national and European regulators have taken steps to locate it in space since the beginning of industrial oil drilling in the 1860s. But key leaders of the oil industry in Northwest Europe, and beyond, have also served as policy makers and aimed to keep legal constraints (decrees, laws, taxes) as limited as possible to prevent the emergence of obstacles in the development of their industry. This process led to a cruel lack of anticipation in the design of rules and urban spaces when dealing with safety. Public authorities continuously established limited frames upon the oil industry and wrote rules in general terms to protect this strategic industry. Today, the pollution and the risks oil companies generated restrict opportunities for the future re-use of industrial sites, and there has been little done on the law-making scale to guide the transformation of oil spaces. Using the case of port cities like Dunkirk, in France, that have emerged as oil ports for their respective countries over the last 150 years, this thesis examines the emergence and application of spatial and environmental regulations along with oil industrial expansion. The objective is to highlight the need to shift from the current reactive process of improving legal frames after a disaster to one that anticipate and deal with the visible and invisible oil heritage
Integrating High-speed Railway Stations and Urban Areas in China: Actors, Processes and Institutions
Get PDFThere is an increasing need for understanding the impacts of institutions on the integrated planning of transport and land use. High-speed railway (HSR) station areas, as nodes in transport networks and mixed-use areas, have become a focus in planning. The fast development of HSR station areas in China causes many problems, such as remote locations, oversized station areas, transfer difficulties, and unsustainable urban development. Facing these problems, this study aims to explore the influences of actors, decision-making processes, and institutions on the planning and development of HSR station areas in China. An analytical framework is built based on Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Policy Network Theory, Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, and State Entrepreneurialism. Qualitative methods offer an effective way of investigating Chinese governance in the development of HSR station areas, including content analysis, case studies, and interviews. The findings show that HSR station areas are mainly used as a tool to promote urbanization. Both the Chinese national government and local governments have an important role to play in the planning of HSR station areas because they control different resources. Their interactions in the decision-making process, influenced by institutions, determine the location of HSR stations and the size of station areas, and lead to transfer difficulties and slow development of station areas. This dissertation reveals the causes of the development problems of Chinese HSR station areas, demonstrates the drawbacks of the current mechanism, and proposes strategies to promote the integration of transport and land use in China
Forest Semiosis: Plant Noesis as Negentropic Potential
Get PDFThis article operationalizes Bernard Stiegler’s conceptualization of the Neganthropocene, expanding his consideration of thinking (penser) as care (panser) or pænsée beyond the anthropo-techne limitations of his thought through the notion of a posthuman asignifying semiotics. It begins with an overview of Stiegler’s notion of the Neganthropocene as a mode of epochal thought building towards noesis and pænsée with the use of epiphylogenetic and exosomatic memory systems. Here, Stiegler’s approach is exposed as anthropo-techne centric, which in turn limits the possibilities of noesis. Turning to the work of C.S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, an alternative formulation of epiphylogenetic memory is provided through the interrelation of trees and forests: in particular the coastal redwood (sequoia sempervirens). This asignifying semiotics provides the criteria for infusing Stiegler’s epiphylogenesis beyond the human. In turn, Stiegler is brought closer to the theories of entangled care presented in the work of theorists such as María Puig De La Bellacasa and Natasha Myers, allowing for a more dynamic design process
Forethoughts and Afterthoughts on ‘the Productive Organs of Man’
Get PDFThis paper explores the ‘forethought’ of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994). In particular, the paper focusses on the coupling of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the impact of these figures on the relay of ideas concerning organs, organic matter and technology, or what Stiegler would come to call ‘organized inorganic matter’. The paper will also consider the ‘afterthought’ that derives from Stiegler’s book and its potential to prompt a rethinking of architectural experimentation and organization. The paper turns to Neil Spiller’s Communicating Vessels project and particularly to one joyous mechanism that came to be titled Little Soft Machinery (2006). The project enfolds all manner of architectural oddity, somewhere between the organic and inorganic
Cedric Price’s Pop-Up Parliament: A Role Model for Media Architecture and Data Politics
Get PDFThe digital era has supposedly had a drastic impact on contemporary forms of political debate. Live-tweets, podcasts, and posts have become the main channels for politics, polemics, and populism alike. But these tendencies are not only an acceleration of the politics of media brought about by the logics behind television, cybernetics, and computation in the post-war era. They gained strength when populist politics appropriated information access via mass media, which once promised the emancipation of ordinary citizens by architectural means through pop-culture.
In this essay I seek to elaborate how Cedric Price’s 1965 design of the Pop-Up Parliament dealt with a media-technical condition of politics, while proposing that architecture was an integral part of the media network of governing. Price’s project is paradigmatic of the 1960s, a period when the media operations of information compression, prediction, and audience targeting became more decisive for politics than the content of debate. This analysis allows us, on the one hand, to problematise conventional definitions of populism towards a media-based concept, and on the other, to further our understanding of architecture as a political medium operating directly with media such as documents, television, and computers. This essay argues that the advent of digital media calls for a different architectural history of populism, one which engages with the operativity of media and cultural techniques, rather than relying upon the symbolic representation of ideology in architecture
There and Back Again: Council Housing, Right to Buy and the Politics of Architectural Pluralism
Get PDFThis essay explores the defining role that council housing has played in populist politics in Britain from the post-war era to the present. Central to this was Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme – an archetypal populist policy that became totemic of her broader reconfiguration of British society. Building on the demonisation of council housing that paved the way for Right to Buy, today, it stands as the implicit foil for the present right-wing government’s populist advocation of ‘beauty’ (i.e. traditional styles) as a way of removing objections to future development. Meanwhile, the populist left argues for a return to the mass council house building of the post-war era, despite the recent success of small-scale, tactical council housing projects, such as those by Peter Barber Architects. The essay argues that the polarised and asymmetrical nature of this debate, conflating questions of aesthetics, typology and planning and tenure type, is typical of populist politics, ensuring a middle ground is by definition impossible. The essay concludes with the contention that if populist politics tends towards a monocultural architecture and urbanism, then a built environment that allows room for different forms, ideas and agendas may itself help foster a politics of pluralism
End Times and Architectural Style on the Christian Campus
Get PDFThis paper examines the idea of architectural style on evangelical Christian campuses built during the Cold War, a period during which religious cosmologies came into contact with the prospect of nuclear disaster, allowing for a temporary alliance between secular and religious visions of the end of human history. In this context of Cold War-era end-of-the-world thinking, and in relation to the biblical anticipation of the apocalypse, I consider the contrasting choices of so-called futuristic and neo-vernacular idioms in the building projects of television evangelists. What does it mean to revive styles of the past, or to build in a mode oriented toward the future, when the end of history is imminent? Design undertaken within the framework of assumed apocalyptic narratives troubles notions of permanence and durability—historically vital terms for thinking about building. The paper takes two primary case studies: Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, which hosts the Christian Broadcasting Network and was built in a “Jeffersonian” vernacular; and Oral Roberts’s Tulsa university, unique at the time for its gilded modernism
Speculative Architecture
Get PDFWhat is the problem of epiphylogenesis? We can define and understand the term, but what does it do and what does it demand of us? Indeed, one way of thinking about epiphylogenesis is through Bernard Stiegler’s claim that some forms of technology generate or enable long circuits of desire, and that this needs to be recalled in a time of short-circuits. Epiphylogenesis requires both that we pose problems differently, and that ‘we’ are, or should be, a problem to ourselves. Let me unpack this by beginning with what presents itself as a major problem: climate change, and the end of the world. What are we going to do? How can we change course? How do we save the world? The posing of the question in this way is only possible if there is a distinct ‘we’ who must then deliberate a course of action in relation to the world. Epiphylogenesis shifts the question towards the very possibility of this ‘we.’ How do formations of what comes to think of itself as ‘the human’ come into being, and what worlds and capacities do such formations make possible? For Stiegler the problem of climate change is ultimately the problem of who ‘we’ are, along with a constitutive tendency towards the failure to confront this question
Technical Assistance of the Soviet Specialists to China on Urban Planning in 1949-1959
Get PDFA highlight of the urban planning activities in the early days of the People’s Republic of China was the massive number of professional Soviet specialists sent to technically assist China with urban planning. This was also a unique phenomenon in the international urban planning sector. More than forty Soviet specialists, who could be categorized into four series, were sent to China over a 10-year period to provide technical assistance, commencing from the arrival of the first series of Soviet municipal engineering specialists in August 1949 to the return of the last series of specialists in May 1959. By virtue of the technical assistance of the Soviet planners China managed to learn from Soviet planning theory in its entirety and developed urban reconstruction & expansion plans for a number of existing megacities as well as a number of important emerging industrial cities. Furthermore, thanks to the Soviet specialists, China was able to train and acquire a multitude of first-generation urban planners of its own who instilled into modern Chinese planning model a “cultural gene” which, originating primarily from the Soviet model, characterized socialist urban planning