how to reduce energy use by 10% in commercial buildings? — Datacity
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Iman Ahmed : Junior Innovation Programs Manager, NUMA
Iman, which projects have you worked on as part of DataCity?
Cutting Paris City Hall’s energy consumption by 10% before 2020 by changing behaviour
I worked on a Challenge aimed at cutting the energy consumption of public buildings through awareness-raising initiatives for building managers. The team which tackled this Challenge was Aurélie Guillon (SETEC), Manon Dirand (from the start-up Beebryte), Marie-Emilie Legrand and Anne-Gaelle Baptiste, Auréliane Labourdette, all from the Paris City Hall Heritage and Architecture Division, as well as Jean-Philippe Clément (Chief Data Officer at Paris City Hall). Such a large and cross-cutting team from Paris City Hall was appropriate because the Challenge was part of the Paris Climate Agreement, under which Paris City Hall undertook to cut its energy bill by 10% through behavioural changes.
The aim of this Challenge was therefore to make public building managers the driving forces behind the energy consumption of their buildings, in order to reduce the City’s energy bill and pointless over-consumption of electricity and gas. How is it possible to raise awareness of energy issues among the managers of nurseries, sports halls and district city halls when these very issues have been only peripheral to their duties up to now? To do so, all partners conducted user research to meet managers. Together, they created a dashboard in order to view the buildings’ energy consumption in real time. The managers were then able to select the data to be made available as a priority by sensors connected to their buildings. In addition, week after week, they received personalised monitoring of their energy-saving measures via an automatic alert system.
What was the most difficult moment and which result are you most proud of?

Contrary to what we thought, the two biggest difficulties were not related to technology, but to people.
The first difficulty was to get a very busy target group on-board(nursery managers, etc.), fully occupied by operations and urgent situations. Rather than asking them to come to NUMA as initially planned, we changed our method and went to meet them in their workplace.
The second difficulty was identified by Fiodor Tonti, the UX Designerwho was assisting us. He believed that we were working on an issue that users themselves had not yet identified and were not aware of (cutting energy consumption). We are therefore working with users for whom we have anticipated the pain points. We needed to design the dashboard as a graft to managers’ activities and as a complementary tool. Rather than being considered a product in itself, the RDV conso dashboard has successfully become a part of managers’ daily tasks and tools.
If this project was replicated in all cities worldwide …
In all cities across the globe, public building managers are critical of the lack of visibility on the consumption of their buildings, despite them actually being the most powerful lever for action. Ultimately, the application wishes to create manager communities within Paris, and why not in other cities so that they can compare their efforts and consumption. This would result in smaller bills for local authorities and guaranteed energy savings on a global scale.
The second Challenge you worked on was:
When technology places people at the centre of office design decisions
As part of DataCity, I assisted Ghislain Bourgin (Cisco), Virginie Dinh de Bossoreille (Nexity), Antoine Plantier (from the start-up Sharing Cloud), Guillaume Crozet (from the start-up Irynx) and Frédéric Gauzy (SFR). The aim of the Challenge was to optimise the occupancy rate of office spaces while providing the best work conditions for users. To meet the Challenge, we worked on a decision support tool for space planners working on office design. It is a dashboard which displays the real-time use of meeting rooms, open spaces and flex offices, highlighting any under-occupied or over-occupied spaces. This data is collected by 11 thermal sensors installed by Guillaume and his teams in three work spaces of the Nexity headquarters. Data was also compared to booking data extracted from Sharing Cloud’s room and workstation booking platform. The dashboard revealed the use of spaces and users’ habits, a fact which enables general resources departments to make the best decisions for the comfort of employees, while optimising space occupancy.
What was the most difficult moment and which result are you most proud of?

We moved from a Challenge which was initially called “Smart Building” to “Optimising work spaces while guaranteeing user comfort”. There was a long journey between the two names. The issue is very broad and the main difficulty was selecting a direction to tackle the Challenge. The entire team went through many periods of doubt, as it was difficult to choose the persons on whom we should be focusing, hesitating between a tool for employees, or for general resources departments. We therefore conducted more than a dozen user interviews at the Nexity headquarters which allowed us to come to a decision, by identifying that the main pain point was the General Resources Department. The data visualisation workshops during the construction of the dashboard with François Prosper helped us to fine-tune the target profile by asking questions about the information we wanted to demonstrate.
If this project was replicated in all cities worldwide …
If this project was replicated in all cities worldwide, DataCity would have a significant impact on the work conditions of employees in global cities. The pressure of real estate, the growing shortage of space and the changing employee working methods will urge companies to make an about-turn in their workspace management. This has already been observed in France and in the USA. Yet, without a tool and without visibility on the use of space or employees’ needs, companies will have a negative effect on work efficiency and above all on their employees’ health. Working on “smart buildings” also means working to place people at the centre of decisions and to articulate the surrounding environment to suit key needs.
Read the other article of this serie here!
Originally published at datacity.numa.co on July 10, 2017.
