[T]he integration of sophisticated sensing and actuation technologies for building-systems control will enable the benefits of understanding and responding to changing environmental conditions and the dynamic needs of the occupants.
Technology and the Future of Cities (PCAST 2016)
Using over 20,000 sensors, in The Edge it’s possible to accurately monitor in real-time how the building is being used…. Everyone … with a smartphone or tablet may … regulate the light and the “climate” of his workplace…. [The lights] are only active when necessary … intelligent technology can contribute to a smarter and more efficient use of buildings.
Edge developer OVG (2016)
Every major technological shift has had an impact on the shape of buildings and cities, as well as the people that use them. The development of iron and steel enabled taller buildings, but without electricity to power and communicate between them, air conditioning to cool them, and elevators to make their heights accessible, we would still be building three- and four-story buildings such as we find in cities from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Digital technology in the past 50 years has revolutionized both communication and computation. Today’s smartphone users are texting or watching cat videos on a computer much more powerful than those that accompanied astronauts to the moon (Tomayko 1988). How have these changes altered our buildings, our cities, and our construction processes? How can architects integrate this technology into the design and production of new buildings in ways that improve building performance and occupant quality of life? How can government facilitate improved design, energy efficiency, and healthy, resilient communities through technological innovation? The two quotes above, one from a US White House report and the other describing a new building in the Netherlands, illustrate how deeply intertwined computing and the built environment are becoming.
In his book Me++, Bill Mitchell illustrated the impacts of digital technology on architecture by reviewing the architectural changes that banks have gone through in the past few decades (Mitchell 2003). At the end of the nineteenth century, banks needed to convey “trustworthiness” to customers so they would deposit their money with the bank. As a result, bank buildings were solid brick or stone edifices, with polished stone and wood-paneled interiors, as well as very visible and elaborate vaults. In the middle of the twentieth century the automobile inaugurated the drive-up bank, where you could do all your banking without stepping out of your car. In the late twentieth century, the anytime anywhere bank innovation—the ATM—meant a further reduction in bulk while delivering the same or greater functionality, perhaps in the local 24-hour convenience store. Today, electronic processing of deposits and payments is commonplace, supported by sophisticated computer systems, and we are even less concerned with the physicality of checks and cash. Money has been reduced to a balance displayed on the screen—a communications and computing issue. The banking application on your smartphone lets you check your balance, deposit checks, and move money around between accounts without entering a physical institution. As a result, some banks now do all their business online.
Some of the issues related to formal design of buildings and the social and legal structures that support design activity have been discussed in earlier chapters. In this chapter we’ll have a quick review of the ways information technology is changing individual building use, as well as impacts on urban areas containing multiple buildings—what we hope will be the “smart cities” of the future.
The White House report identifies four opportunities in the realm of buildings and housing: “(1) pre-fabrication, (2) modular construction, (3) customization and personalization, and (4) technologies for sensing and actuation” (PCAST 2016). The first two of these would mean replacing current practice, in which most construction is one-of-a-kind, both in terms of the construction team and the actual building configuration, with a more industrial approach. This is often cited as a factor in the “missing productivity” mentioned in Chapter 3, as is inclement weather conditions on exposed construction sites. Though often associated with cheap mobile homes and low-quality projects from the 1960s, these strategies are seeing more successful use today. Supported by strong BIM databases, project visualization, and customization opportunities (all tied to digital technology), off-site fabrication of panels or modules, possibly with the help of computer-controlled tools and robots, would allow experience to inform production, making it more efficient while reducing waste and risk to workers in a weather-proof environment, but without sacrificing quality or variation. The rise of modular design means buildings are increasingly being “installed” rather than constructed—in days rather than weeks or months (BDCNetwork 2012). Of course, neither all building designs nor all materials are suitable to this sort of construction; designers and fabricators need to work together closely to create or discover the best opportunities to deploy these strategies.
Banks are not the only building type changed by technological developments. High-rise buildings use algorithms to dispatch elevators according to historical patterns of demand. They precool with night-time air when possible to reduce day-time air-conditioning loads. Businesses issue employees with ID cards that can be used to open parking garages, give elevator access to secure floors, or unlock doors. Some systems even monitor the location of employee cellular phones (via Bluetooth) to identify conference room use in real time, record meeting attendance, etc. (Robin 2016). Use of resources and building or room access can be tracked and monitored by managers, and scheduled or disabled depending on employee status. These changes to building operations impact system capacities used in designs, but others more directly impact building occupants. One new complex in Sweden goes so far as to offer tenants the option of inserting an RFID chip under the skin of their hand to provide access to doors and copiers (Cellan-Jones 2015).
One of the reasons we construct buildings is to bring information and people together in one place to work and communicate. To the extent and degree that digital technologies can deliver comparable experiences, we might reduce the need to build, but where will we spend our time—at home? Many young people today are both social and entrepreneurial. Their patterns trend more toward the short-term, limited-occupancy models of the sharing economy. New building-occupancy models and organizations leverage physical proximity to mix work and social life—the co-founder of WeWork calls its co-work spaces a “physical social network” (Rice 2015)—perhaps reducing the need for the non-work spaces, such as large suburban houses or freeways. Whether seen as a threatening or a promising development, it is an architectural concern, as real as cubicle-farms and corner-offices, lunchrooms, reception, and conference spaces. Understanding the affordances of architecture in the context of cultural change, business operations, and human behavior will help make digitally augmented offices or virtual environments more humane and productive.
Delivering a productive work environment to the individual is more than power, network, and a refrigerator or microwave oven in the common room. Individual needs, including thermal and lighting comfort, have been considerations in building design all along, but the advent of inexpensive wireless sensors and digital processing means the assessment and control of comfort can be more nuanced in space and time, and need not be aggregated around single-point sensors like thermostats, or single-point controls such as light switches or clocks. Building systems can often control lighting and mechanical systems almost to the level of individual desks. Lighting levels can be sensed and lighting adjusted automatically. Where day-lighting is a significant component of work lighting, blinds or shades are often adjusted by sensors today. In 2014 NBBJ developed and presented a prototype sunshade that could be adjusted at the level of individual glazing panels, based not on a schedule, but on exterior conditions, interior needs, and user wishes gathered through smartphone apps (Brownell 2014).
As ongoing and substantial consumers of energy and water, the buildings and their operation have attracted attention for many years. Unfortunately, it is difficult to know if our actions have the intended effect. Measuring actual energy use at the building component level has required a great deal of expense installing wired sensor networks, so it is not done often. Measuring use at the building’s electricity and gas meters can tell you overall energy consumption, but not much more. As a result we don’t really know how well most building designs perform. New inexpensive sensors and ubiquitous wireless networks mean that much more can be done to validate simulation results and diagnose problem buildings. In addition, though such sensor networks traditionally required a substantial number of “point of service” sensors, recent research with single-point-of-contact sensors and machine-learning promises energy and water use monitoring with even greater cost reduction and greater data flows (Froehlich et al. 2011). Analyzing that data and drawing appropriate architectural, operational, and building-code lessons from it is likely to be a substantial area of research in coming years.
Building skins, long recognized as a domain of aesthetic expression by the designer, are also recognized as critically important components of the building’s ability to deliver visual and thermal comfort to occupants without consuming vast amounts of energy. So-called “high performance” buildings that sip rather than gulp power are increasingly common and their control systems are almost always digitally monitored and directed.
At the same time, lighting is undergoing several revolutions. New construction often includes occupancy sensors that turn lights off when they think a room is unoccupied. New long-lived LED light sources work off of low-voltage circuits and may be individually addressable and dimmable, allowing the type and topology of wiring to change, while potentially eliminating the need for a wired wall switch. Mobile device apps and Wi-Fi networks deliver building status data to the desktop and take instructions, but do require network and power services.
Developing smart control strategies and systems such as those deployed in The Edge will be an important part of smart environments of the future. Research and development in this area of design computing will help to integrate such systems into routine design and operations so we use resources intelligently, and (hopefully) so we do not have to wave our arms periodically to prove we are alive to keep the lights on.
Our many electrical devices mean that wall outlets and their related “plug-loads” in offices now account for approximately 25 percent of building energy use (GSA 2012). While airports and university lecture halls were often built with only a few power outlets in the past, they are being remodeled to provide much more power for occupant laptops and associated devices, and building managers are looking for ways to distinguish between devices that are always on because they need to be (e.g., a computer server or electrical clock) and those that are always on because we don’t turn them off (e.g., desktop printers), allowing power management systems to shut them down at night. As designers often determine or select the systems that interface between occupants and building systems, it makes sense for us to think about the best way for such interfaces to work and to be aware of available options.
It is posited that, through the integration of data services … cities can be transformed.
Boyle et al. (2013)
Beyond individual buildings, at the civic or urban design scale, the way we govern, work, and move about is changing. Many businesses adopt flexible hours and working arrangements, including telework from home. These policies ease commutes, but so do urban-scale data systems such as Seattle’s real-time “e-park” off-street parking availability data stream (Seattle 2016). Smartphone apps that provide real-time scheduling or transit information (TFL 2016; OneBusAway 2016) effectively turn every smartphone or tablet into an information kiosk, just as they have already turned every coffee-shop into a field-office. The “Street Bump” project in Boston (New Urban Mechanics 2016; Simon 2014) enlisted phone-toting citizens across the city to help identify and locate potholes. Simply by running the Street Bump app on their accelerometer-equipped smartphone and traveling within the city, phones were turned into street-roughness sensors.
Obviously, while they may not require a wired connection to communicate, sensors still need power to run. Supplying that power creates a substantial installation expense that has limited our ability to take advantage of long-term sensing in buildings; sensing that might provide early warning of water infiltration, failures in door and window seals, rot, etc. Fortunately, continued miniaturization of electronics, research in peer-to-peer networks, and experience scavenging power from the sea of ambient energy radiated by normal power circuits in buildings is leading to the development of ultra-low-power sensor systems, sometimes referred to as “smart dust” (Hempstead et al. 2005). In outdoor settings, solar power is often available, such as solar-powered compacting garbage bins that help reduce resource consumption by eliminating unnecessary service trips (Bigbelly 2016). When both power and communication are wireless, many new opportunities to both gather and apply data become feasible.
The deployment of sizable embedded and walking sensor networks is allowing us to find efficiencies, but it may also allow us to check the assertions that have been made by restrictive-code advocates, engineers, and designers for years. Building owners and managers, as well as organizations such as the US Green Building Council, are accumulating information about the actual use and performance of their buildings, data that will demonstrate or debunk the efficacy of many conservation strategies. This is a relatively new phenomenon, but the potential for improved design implied by this feedback loop is substantial (Davis 2015). Its realization will require skilled and careful analysis, as well as political savvy.
Cities all over the world are trying to use widespread sensing to become more efficient—launching projects that aim to improve their governance and policing functions through digital technology. London is known for its use of closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras, but is just one of many cities that have instrumented city infrastructure and are making that information available. The city of Chicago, in collaboration with Argonne National Labs, is deploying sensors along city streets in an effort to quantify urban weather, air pollution, sound, and vibration, building an open-source real-time data stream. The goal is to study and ultimately understand what makes a city healthy, efficient, and safe (Sankaran et al. 2014). As our understanding of systems and processes in the urban setting comes into greater focus, it is likely that new design paradigms will emerge.
As we leaf through a photo-album of summer vacation photos we revisit those places. The degree to which we disconnect from our physical surroundings and enter into the experience of the other reality is referred to as immersion. Different media, such as movies or stereoscopic image pairs, produce different degrees of immersion. Virtual reality, a term coined in the 1980s, refers to an immersive experience in which multiple sensory inputs, such as vision, hearing, and touch, are produced by digital technology, artificially producing a cognitive state of “being there” similar to that of the real world.
Virtual environments are often used for training and entertainment, and also hold promise for social-networking, shopping, and education experiences. These applications often utilize architectural or urban settings and metaphors. Though never intended to be instantiated in the real world, they work best when they “feel right”—when they are designed using the patterns and expectations of the natural world (Wonka et al. 2003). This represents an employment or research opportunity for designers, architectural historians, and other researchers who study the built environment.
Most virtual environments are created in traditional modeling software and only consumed in an immersive setting, a condition that most designers would like to change. As mentioned in Chapter 9, research is taking place regarding “in-world” interaction paradigms and instruments equivalent to mice or tablets that will enable a designer to edit the very environment they inhabit. Such tools, if accessible to homeowners, might revolutionize the field of design. They already challenge us to reflect on the core features of good design.
Other opportunities exist as well. Historical databases of typical designs, linked to vision-based analysis, might assist first-responders in active-shooter or natural disaster situations where limited real-time information is available. Augmented reality systems that overlay synthetic content on top of normal vision may give us the ability to place signage, advertising, and even entire building skins in the virtual realm while registering them with features of the physical world. These new technological opportunities all include elements of design and technology—the realm of the architect.
Increasing use is being made of digital sensing technologies in buildings, both during and after construction. These data streams can be monitored and compared to predictions to ascertain actual building performance, preemptively intervene to solve problems, and retroactively assess designer and contractor performance. Increasingly, developers, designers, and contractors are all looking to leverage this new data to make their operations more productive or their buildings safer, but each has unique data and processing needs. These developments are creating new opportunities for specialization and business. Ultimately, big-data research may help resolve questions that exist regarding disappointing building energy savings (Mehaffy and Salingaros 2013) in the face of claims of success (GSA 2008). The data will allow us to better connect our sophisticated numerical simulation tools to the real worlds of inhabitation, practice, and construction.
In the meantime, patterns of building use, from residential, to commercial office space and parking structures, are changing under the influence of communications and information technologies. Given the speed of those changes and the lifespan of most building projects, designers will need to be attentive to questions of building services flexibility, sensing, and intelligent response opportunities that enable environments to be custom fit to changing patterns.
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