Building Models of Practice

I presented part of my research on historical software for building design in the “Are you a Model?” international conference organized at TU Darmstadt in November 2022. In my paper titled “Building Models of Practice: The OXSYS Software for Hospital Design”, I focused on the database structure of the historical OXSYS software for hospital design. I suggested that the database was the element that enabled the integration, both pragmatically and conceptually, of building and information systems into a single computational model. By looking at the OXSYS software through its data structures, I rehearsed a novel historiographic approach to software as models of practices. Such an approach means attending to how computational systems produce operational representations of existing practices, embedding their directives and assumptions. Ultimately, this paper argued that computerizing a model of building such as Oxford’s system for hospital design is, in fact, an attempt to operationalize a model of practice.

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