From Digital Design to Data-Assets: Competing Visions, Policy Projects, and Emerging Arrangements of Value Creation in the Digital Transformation of Construction

Abstract

The construction sector faces multiple challenges such as poor productivity, performance, and competitiveness and has a huge share in global waste production, CO2 emissions, and resource depletion. In this situation, a broad range of public and private stakeholders place their hopes on the digitalisation of construction, in particular, building information modelling (BIM). The article seeks to destabilise the notion of "the" digitalisation in a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. First, we map out the landscape of digital visions regarding the future of construction by examining pertinent academic, public, and professional discourses in recent years. We identify a vision of industrialised construction, a vision of data-based integration, a vision of singularised architecture, a vision of digital sustainability, and an emerging vision of the "twin green and digital transition." In a diachronic perspective, we zoom in to UK "BIM-and-beyond" policy from 2011 to 2021 and show how BIM has evolved from a digital design tool into a critical component for building a national system of data-assets for data-based value creation. In both perspectives, we see a recurring storyline according to which the sector will solve all its problems if it only undertakes the digital transformation.