Virtual Environments as Techno-Social Performances: Virtual West Cambridge Case-Study

This paper focuses on Virtual West Cambridge – an interactive multimedia environment constructed to support design and development of a large-scale, long-term urban project. In architecture, such persistent, continuously-growing virtual environments are unusual. Consequently, they pose unique challenges in procurement, development, maintenance and utilization. This paper re-conceptualizes virtual environments as situated techno-social performances rather than software programs or multimedia representations and discusses how this re-conceptualisation can inform their understanding, design and utilisation.