Designing digital artifacts as transient assemblies with different digital materialities

This paper is inspired by the concept of digital metamaterials and advances a proposal for a genre of digital artifacts that exhibit the transformative capacity to transcend technical boundaries in digital ecosystems. In terms of theoretical footing, our approach is ground on the conception of 'software as material' with intrinsic properties such as interactivity, editability, openness and reprogrammability, distributedness and emergence. We claim that as these properties are purposefully inscribed into digital artifacts, the latter become transient assemblies capable of exhibiting different digital materialities. To illustrate the concepts, the paper reflects upon a case study featuring the use of digital composites in boundary spanning virtual collaboration in organic farming.