Material Constraints and Digital Affordances in a 'Smart' Educational Building

My paper will reflect on the interplay between digital infrastructures and everyday organisational practices in a technologically laden 'smart and sustainable' university building. It is this building/object, in which I have been conducting an organisational ethnography, attuned with a sociomaterial sensitivity (Carlile et al. 2013), for my PhD. I will explore the tension between design intentions, for wired and wireless mobilities, and lived experience, located within a space that was explicitly anticipated to redefine and facilitate digitally enhanced teaching pedagogies and active learning practices.  Looking at, amongst other things, the materiality of the teaching spaces themselves,  introduction of BYOD policies, the impact of unconventional/jagged geometry on digital and spatial experience, as well efforts to replace analogue signage and information provision with digital forms. I will also render visible the relationship between mobility, connectivity and the ever-present need to power an increasing number of digital devices. Ultimately, however, all of this is precarious and temporally emergent as the seemingly fixed infrastructures are iteratively modified and reassembled. This can be in terms of hardware, such as upgraded Wi-Fi routers that can handle greater numbers of devices. Or software upgrades that facilitate simpler connections to those Wi-Fi networks, as they require less configuring. In discussing the above, I will build on the sociomaterially attentive work of Paul Leonardi (2011, 2012, 2013), who has critiqued accounts of the constitutive entanglement of sociomateriality (also described as agential-realist accounts, following Barad (2003, 2007, 2013)) for not ccounting for the constraints, of the material affordances, embedded in the artefacts humans are entangled with, digital or otherwise.