Publications
111 results found
Nikolić D, Maftei L, Whyte J, 2019, Becoming familiar: how infrastructure engineers begin to use collaborative virtual reality in their interdisciplinary practice, Journal of Information Technology in Construction, Vol: 24, Pages: 489-508, ISSN: 1400-6529
The design community has recently shown increased interest in using virtual reality (VR) in project review contexts. While single-user headsets currently attract most VR-related attention, room-like immersive VR environments can help facilitate design team engagement and shared exploration of projects. However, to date relatively little research concerns how large-scale VR environments are used in and adapted for professional practice. To address this gap, we set up a bespoke portable VR display system called 3D-MOVE in a major UK construction office to investigate how project team members used and evaluated collaborative VR processes. Over a three-month period, we conducted ten video-recorded VR sessions to observe how engineering professionals familiarize themselves with VR in order to help inform its deployment in practice. The study results show that emergent discussions about design models and questioning of design-related assumptions dominated all observed sessions, even though they were staged as technology demonstrations; which supports the social aspects of large-scale collaborative VR processes. However, before participants could focus on design review, they had to familiarize themselves with the VR technology and time required to do so varied depending on the complexity of the VR configuration. As the participants engaged with the VR environment, they reflected on their processes, requirements and expectations and provided feedback for improving the VR experience. Articulating this familiarization with collaborative VR can inform its deployment with respect to minimizing the learning curve and any distractions or discomfort associated with its use while maximizing the aspects of value-added collaborative engagement. Additional considerations concerning content, interactivity and logistics emerged as necessary to address before VR technologies can become standard practice.
Zhang R, Zhou A, Tahmasebi S, et al., 2019, Long-standing themes and new developments in offsite construction: the case of UK housing, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Civil Engineering, Vol: 172, Pages: 29-35, ISSN: 0965-089X
This paper reviews the evolution of offsite construction methods in UK housing over the past 15 years and puts this in an international context. Long-standing themes include targets for construction productivity, challenges of labour shortages and skills, desire to learn across sectors and a need to develop new business models. Newer developments include research and development funding through the UK government’s ‘transforming construction’ initiative, higher pre-manufactured value and increased digitisation. The paper concludes with recommendations for practice, policy and research.
Jones K, Davies A, Mosca L, et al., 2019, Changing Business Models: Implications for Construction, Publisher: Transforming Construction Network Plus, Digest Series
Zhou ASJ, Chen L, Whyte J, 2019, Information Exchange in Platform Approaches to Design for Manufacture and Assembly, 36th International Conference of CIB W78
Hall DM, Whyte JK, Lessing J, 2019, Mirror-breaking strategies to enable digital manufacturing in Silicon Valley construction firms: a comparative case study, CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT AND ECONOMICS, ISSN: 0144-6193
Comi A, Whyte J, Jaradat S, 2019, Constructing shared professional vision in design work: the role of visual objects and their material mediation, Design Studies, ISSN: 0142-694X
Mosca L, Whyte J, Zhang R, 2019, Regional Innovation Systems and the Transformation of construction into a Manufacturing Process., 35th Annual ARCOM conference
Balasubrahmaniam M, Kuttantharappel Soman R, Whyte J, et al., 2019, Temporality, innovation and megaproject-to-megaproject learning across continents in the case of Crossrail and Nagpur Metro, 35th European Group for Organizational Studies Colloqium
Whyte JK, 2019, How digital information transforms project delivery models, Project Management Journal, Vol: 50, Pages: 177-194, ISSN: 1938-9507
This study articulates how increasingly pervasive digital information transforms project delivery models. It builds on and extends literatures on innovation and knowledge codification, analysing London’s evolving digital innovation ecosystem across fifteen years of industry/government initiatives and infrastructure megaprojects. Findings suggests profound and ongoing changes in digitally-enabled project delivery models. Novel contributions are: first, to identify new generations of integrated solutions; second, to articulate changes in supply-chains and relationships with owners, operators and end-users; and third, to recognize the growing importance of digital workflows and analytics, rather than documents. There are implications for project management practice and scholarship.
Tee R, Davies A, Whyte JK, 2019, Modular designs and integrating practices: managing collaboration through coordination and cooperation, Research Policy, Vol: 48, Pages: 51-61, ISSN: 0048-7333
Collaboration in large-scale projects introduces challenges involving both coordination (the ability to collaborate) as well as cooperation (the willingness to do so). Existing research has shown how modular designs can improve coordination by locating interdependencies within rather than between different modules. Based on an in-depth case study of collaboration in a large-scale infrastructure project, our study highlights an effect of modularity on collaboration that previously has been overlooked. Specifically, we show that while modular designs may help overcome coordination challenges by reducing interdependencies between modules, they can in turn hamper collaboration by emphasizing specialization within modules. Therefore, though existing work typically perceives modularity and integration as opposites, we clarify how they can also act as complements. In particular, we show how firms need to complement modular designs with integrating practices that stimulate cooperation. Overall, we contribute to the literature on collaboration and modularity by explaining when and how organizations can combine modularity and integration.
Comi A, Whyte J, 2018, Future making and visual artefacts: an ethnographic study of a design project, Organization Studies, Vol: 39, Pages: 1055-1083, ISSN: 1741-3044
Current research on strategizing and organizing has explored how practitioners make sense of an uncertain future, but provides limited explanations of how they actually make a realizable course of action for the future. A focus on making rather than sensemaking brings into view the visual artefacts that practitioners use in giving form to what is ‘not yet’ – drawings, models and sketches. We explore how visual artefacts are used in making a realizable course of action, by analysing ethnographic data from an architectural studio designing a development strategy for their client. We document how visual artefacts become enrolled in practices of imagining, testing, stabilizing and reifying, through which abstract imaginings of the future are turned into a realizable course of action. We then elaborate on higher-order findings that are generalizable to a wide range of organizational settings, and discuss their implications for future research in strategizing and organizing. This paper contributes in two ways: first, it offers future making as an alternative perspective on how practitioners orient themselves towards the future (different from current perspectives such as foreseeing, future perfect thinking and wayfinding). Second, it advances our understanding of visual artefacts and their performativity in the making of organizational futures.
Senthilvel M, K Soman R, Mahalingam A, et al., 2018, Towards Digital Delivery of Metro-rail Projects in India, The 7th World Construction Symposium
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, Towards digital maturity, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 2ND EDITION, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, Pages: 129-146, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, User experience in VR systems, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 2ND EDITION, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, Pages: 14-42, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, Virtual Reality and the Built Environment Second edition Preface, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 2ND EDITION, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, Pages: VII-VIII, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, Visualizing design, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 2ND EDITION, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, Pages: 72-102, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, Virtual Reality and the Built Environment, 2nd Edition, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
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- Citations: 17
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, Visualizing construction, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 2ND EDITION, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, Pages: 103-128, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, Virtual Reality and the Built Environment Second edition Introduction, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 2ND EDITION, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, Pages: 1-13, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
Whyte J, Nikolic D, 2018, Visualizing city operations, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, 2ND EDITION, Publisher: ROUTLEDGE, Pages: 43-71, ISBN: 978-1-138-66875-1
Brookes N, Sage D, Dainty A, et al., 2017, An island of constancy in a sea of change: rethinking project temporalities with long-term megaprojects, International Journal of Project Management, Vol: 35, Pages: 1213-1224, ISSN: 0263-7863
This paper examines the organizational phenomena of long-term projects. While research literature frames projects as “temporary organizations”, megaprojects have long initiation and delivery phases, lasting years sometimes decades, and deliver capital assets that are used for decades or centuries. Instead of short-duration activity within a fixed organizational context, these projects involve multiple temporalities, combining more and less temporary forms of organizing in the process of enactment. Using an example of a long-term infrastructural megaproject, a wind-farm, to illustrate the phenomenon, we contribute by articulating different temporalities associated with the delivery project, life-cycle; stakeholder organizations that set up the project; and special purpose vehicles through which it is delivered. Implications of these temporalities for project management research and practice are discussed with reference to understandings of risk and knowledge. We argue that focus on long-term projects and their multiple temporalities opens up new ways of thinking about projects as temporary organizations.
Whyte JK, Hartmann T, 2017, How digitizing building information transforms the built environment., Building Research and Information, Vol: 45, Pages: 591-595, ISSN: 0961-3218
K Soman R, Birch D, Whyte J, 2017, Framework for shared visualization and real-time information flow to the construction site, 24th International Workshop on Intelligent Computing in Engineering
K Soman R, Whyte J, 2017, A Framework for Cloud-Based Virtual and Augmented Reality using Real-time Information for Construction Progress Monitoring, Lean and Computing in Construction Congress (LC3).
Lobo S, Whyte J, 2017, Aligning and reconciling: building project capabilities for digital delivery, Research Policy, Vol: 46, Pages: 93-107, ISSN: 0048-7333
Digital delivery of complex projects, using integrated software and processes, is an important emerging phenomenon as it transforms relationships across the associated ecology of project-based firms. Our study analyses how a project-based firm, ‘Global Engineering’, builds new project capabilities for digital delivery through work on three major road and railway infrastructure projects. We find that it seeks to: (1) align the project set-up with the firm’s existing capabilities; and (2) reconcile differing agendas and capabilities in collaborating firms across the project ecology. Here, aligning involves influencing the set-up of digital delivery and renegotiating that set-up during project implementation; and reconciling involves managing across multiple digital systems; accommodating and learning other firms’ software and processes; and using digital technologies to create shared identity across the firms involved in delivery. We argue that creating relative stability enables firms to use existing, and build new, project capabilities, and hence aligning and reconciling are important to project-based firms in environments where there is high interdependence across heterogeneous firms and rapid technological change. We find that building these capabilities involves both ‘economies of repetition’ and ‘economies of recombination’; the former enabling the firm to capture value by mobilizing existing resources and the latter, requiring additional work to re-combine existing and new resources. Our study thus provides insight into how project-based firms build project capabilities for the digital delivery of complex projects in order to remain competitive in their existing markets, and has broader implications for learning in the project ecologies associated with these projects.
Whyte J, Tryggestad K, Comi A, 2017, Visualizing practices in project-based design: tracing connections through cascades of visual representations, Engineering Project Organization Journal, Vol: 6, Pages: 115-128, ISSN: 2157-3735
Project-based design involves a variety of visual representations, which are evolved to make decisions and accomplish project objectives. Yet, such mediated and distributed ways of working are difficult to capture through ethnographies that examine situated design. A novel approach is developed that follows cascades of visual representations; and this is illustrated through two empirical studies.In the first case, Heathrow Terminal 5, analysisstarts from paper- and model-work used to develop design, tracing connections forward to an assembly manual that forms a ‘consolidated cascade’of visual representations. In the second, the Turning Torso, Malmö, analysisstarts froma planning document, tracingconnections backward tothepaper-and model-workdone toproduce this consolidated cascade.Thiswork makes atwofoldcontribution:First, itoffersa methodological approach that supplements ethnographiesof situated design. Thisallows the researcher to be nimble, tracing connections across complex engineering projects; reconstructing practices through their visual representations; and observing their effects. Second, itarticulateshow, in these empirical cases, interaction with a cascade of visual representations enabled participants in project-based design to develop and share understanding. The complexity of projects,and theirdistributed and mediated nature makes this approach timely and important in addressingnew research questions and practical challenges.
Whyte JK, Hartmann T, 2017, How digitizing building information transforms the built environment (vol 45, pg 591, 2017), BUILDING RESEARCH AND INFORMATION, Vol: 45, Pages: EI-EI, ISSN: 0961-3218
Whyte JK, 2016, The future of systems integration within civil infrastructure: A review and directions for research, International Symposium of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), Pages: 1541-1555
What is the future of systems integration within civil infrastructure? This paper provides a background to systems integration; articulates the challenges of civil infrastructure in the mid-21st century; and reviews the state-of-the-art in research on systems integration in the delivery and operation of civil infrastructure. Building on the literature review it highlights opportunities that arise through reframing from projects to systems (and systems of systems), and using the potential of new forms of data analytics. It sets out a research agenda for next generation tools to visualize and understand civil infrastructure as a complex product system.
Whyte J, Stasis A, Lindkvist C, 2016, Managing change in the delivery of complex projects: Configuration management, asset information and 'big data', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT, Vol: 34, Pages: 339-351, ISSN: 0263-7863
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- Citations: 102
Whyte JK, Lindkvist C, Jaradat S, 2016, Passing the baton? Handing over digital data from the project to operations, Engineering Project Organization Journal, Vol: 6, Pages: 2-14, ISSN: 2157-3735
From fieldwork conducted ahead of the London Olympic Games, we develop new understanding of how organizations hand over digital data from the project to operations. Prior research explains how practitioners negotiate meaning across boundaries in ongoing work. However, it gives little attention to hand-over, where one group disengages as another engages. We use the analogy of the baton pass in a relay race to articulate how hand-over requires attention to sequence, timing, passing technique and communication within a time-constrained window of opportunity. In our case study, the project delivery team transfer responsibility for sports venues and other facilities, and their associated digital data, to Games operators. We show how delivery professionals both project the nature of future work; and probe how meanings will be interpreted. They seek to extend the window to discuss and negotiate meaning with operators. Our study contributes to research on engineering projects and on the coordination of knowledge work by articulating the baton pass, window of opportunity and projection and probing activities involved in hand-over. Understanding and improving the hand-over of digital data from the project to operations is important to enable owners and operators to better manage built infrastructure.
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