How People Make a Building Smarter
BREO Part 2 — Building Resource Expression for Occupants
Paul leads the user experience design team in the Los Angeles office of @ArupAmerica. This is the second part of a series that explores ideas for engaging a building’s occupants in making buildings smarter.
“I need not tell you that building is very important activity in our society. Because it provides the shell which houses most of our activities and makes our kind of life possible”. — Ove Arup
Today our buildings have evolved into something more than simply the shells for activities our company’s founder described here. In addition to this fundamental purpose, they have become human-scale computers. Data from a building’s electrical, thermal comfort, air quality, water, natural gas, lighting, waste and audiovisual systems are measured and consolidated through building management systems (BMS) and building operating systems (BOS). Building engineers monitor and control building systems in order to improve building performance . Buildings with advanced capabilities are often referred to as “smart”.
But these efforts fail to leverage one of the smartest things about buildings: the people within them. There is no question that making buildings more efficient is beneficial for the environment, but these systems also inadvertently disconnect us from our building, releasing us from any personal responsibilities to reduce the environmental impact of occupying them. We are “taken care of” by the building’s owners and operators while being disempowered and denied information about our impact, which also prevents us from acting to correct our own potential overconsumption. One could argue that the power, water, etc. have become part of an employee’s benefit package, like health insurance or a paycheck. But, according to the EPA, buildings consume 30% of the electricity in the US[i], creating debilitating resource depletion. The consumption of our earth’s natural resources should not be an employee benefit if it is also an environmental detriment for which we are all responsible every minute of the day.
Survival of the Symbiotic[iii]
The sustainability of our world depends on the great human “hive mind” to participate fully in solving the problems that are leading future generations toward tragedy. In the Anthropocene we have lived a way of life that disregards the long-term impact of our actions. How many more generations can continue to live this way? Everyday, and every minute of the day, we should be doing our part to take corrective action. However without a way to perceive our ongoing consumption and impact, the information needed to motivate us to acting more responsibly is hidden. As Viktoria Cologna and her co-authors state in the Journal of Environmental Psychology:
Accurate perceptions about the mitigation potential of different behaviors can help consumers to reduce their emissions.[ii]
Perhaps it is time for building designers to learn from the thousands of generations that have lived on our land before industrialization and colonization. Indigenous populations throughout the world closely observed and experienced how their surrounding environment “behaved”. Generations passed on stories accumulating generations of knowledge on how they could understand, respect and relate to the world around them[iii]. The local Tongva people who lived on the land we now call Los Angeles, lived in mutuality with the land, waters, flora and fauna. They respected their resources, or as Craig Torres, a member and a teacher of the Tongva culture calls them, their “relatives”. This encouraged the Tongva people to pay close attention to their land with whom they lived symbiotically. They did not carelessly extract from their “relatives” — their relationship to the land was mutual. In return, the trees and plants cared for their people through continuously providing food and medicine.[iv] The flora and fauna were partners in their efforts to survive. Tyson Yunkaporta, an academic, arts critic, and researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland extends their world:
In this way of knowing, there is no difference between you, a stone, a tree, or a traffic light. All contain knowledge, story, pattern. To sit with this story, to discern the pattern, we need to begin by examining (them).
Might there be a “way of knowing” where we can learn to respect and relate to our buildings -made of stones and trees — the way the Tongva people related to their world?
Julia Watson says in her book Lo-Tek — Design by Radical Indigenism:
We need to change how we view the Anthropocene. While human impact is ubiquitous, it does not mean all interactions have led to destruction. This mindset distances both us from nature and nature from us. In contrast, the mindset of indegeneity sees humans as part of nature and has evolved technologies that use biodiversity as a building block. A new mythology of technology in the era of the Anthropocene can replace the pending threat that Nature will destroy us with the optimism that a collaboration with Nature can save us.
Not only are we designing cities, we are designing cultures and communities. As designers we need to remember we are part of nature. Our global survival is dependent upon our thinking shifting from ‘survival of the fittest’ to survival of the most symbiotic as a critical first step.[v]
Smart People
So how does all of this relate to, so called, “smart buildings”? Let’s start by reiterating that, by far, the smartest thing in a building are the human occupants (at least for now). Humans, in concert, can contribute many orders of magnitude of “smartness” to an environment, and yet today we don’t leverage them (us) to improve building performance. The goal of the BREO project is to find ways to create smart(er) buildings by pairing human perception, empathy and intelligence with good algorithms, including artificial intelligence, to make buildings more efficient.
BREO Goals
How might we create buildings that we can relate to through our senses that allow us to understand the building’s daily impacts and contribute to meeting our long-term sustainability goals? To do this, we need to:
- Create building systems that can “express” resource usage in our spaces in real time so that it can be perceived by those of us working within the building,
- Based on this knowledge, enable people ways to act to improve building performance and sustainability and . . .
- Encourage storytelling and activities that enlighten us and encourage community action.
One way we could to this is to use quantitative, numerical meters spread throughout the building to show how many BTUs or kilowatts we use throughout the day. That might be useful, but this series explores ways that we might expand on this type of data delivery to engage our intuition and leverage our natural abilities of observation, honed by thousands of years of evolution to sense what is going on around us and then react. How might we create an indoor environment that expresses the state of the building in the same way a plant expresses its health, or a river expresses the amount of snow that fell in the winter?
A BREO environment, for example, might leverage distributed “decorative” lighting by dynamically changing color to create an ambiance that indicates the amount of electricity used throughout the day. It might change the soundscape to signify if too much water is being used. Or it might add a subtle odor to the air to indicate poor but imperceivable interior air quality. These could become ambient affordances that once internalized, will intuitively influence our actions to conserve or find ways to reduce our consumption. A great existing example of such an intuitive indicator is the sun.[v] When the sun is close to setting into the western horizon — we know that it is time to wrap up what we’re doing and prepare to go home — even though we may not realize it consciously. Even my dog is able to use this intuitive “information” to know when it is time to nudge me to finish what I’m doing and play with her. Once it is internalized, this type of ambient indicator can be a powerful persuasion.
Action Settings
In Welcome to Your World, author Sarah Williams Goldhagen describes environmental elements that prompt action. She writes,
Buildings and interiors and streetscapes are all action settings, places shaping what people do and think and how they engage with one another. Every action setting is composed of what we have been calling affordances, meaning spaces and objects that afford certain actions. [vi]
The common example of an affordance is a chair or stool that “affords” sitting because of the height and size of its horizontal service. In a BREO environment, sensory information signifies what is happening our our behalf and intuitively prompt action on how our extracted resources can or should be used. A BREO environment is an “Action Setting”, albeit a slow action setting. That is, an action setting that requires some time to internalize and induce a (re)action. Observers can “non-consciously”[v] read the data communicated by BREO sensory elements to 1) intuit the resources being supplied on their behalf and 2) understand and act in order to live and work more sustainably.
In the next part of this series we will explore what it means to create sensory environments that might allow us to intuitively understand how much electricity, water, gas, waste or any other dynamic resource that we consume. This way of interacting with buildings will enable us to partner with existing building technology to increase our odds of planetary survival.
End Notes
[i] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-04/documents/promoting_energy_efficiency_with_energy_star.pdf
[ii] Viktoria Cologna, Anne Berthold, Michael Siegris — Knowledge, perceived potential and trust as determinants of low- and high-impact pro-environmental behaviours, Journal of Environmental Psychology
Volume 79, February 2022, 101741
[iii] Julia Watson, Lo — TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism
[iv] Conversation with Craig Torres, Tongva elder and teacher
[v] Conversation with Norah Eldridge, Arup
[vi] Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World
