The Smartest Building
BREO Part 1 — Creating a more Extroverted Building
Paul leads the user experience design team in the Los Angeles office of @ArupAmerica
Recently, I added another IoT device to my home network. As part of some research we’ve been doing here at Arup on smart buildings and sustainability, I ordered a water meter that is designed to monitor a home’s water usage on a very granular level. Our research at Arup explores methods of using real-time building data to engage and persuade people to conserve resources and improve building performance. The foundation of this effort is digital metering — and this new water meter looked like a simple and effective way to experiment and personally understand how behavior can change when an occupant (me) can monitor water, or any building resource, in near real-time.
Once I completed the simple installation, I found that the quality of the data was better than I had expected. In addition to near real-time metering of all household water use, through machine learning the daily reports included estimates of how our water was being used, i.e., outdoor, showers, toilets and general indoor use. It was impressive. After a few months I was able to cross-check the data with my water bill and it seemed well aligned with the City’s reading.
Our research at Arup explores ways to provide this type of data to offices and other public spaces with the goals of informing and persuading building occupants to consume more carefully. To see how much water I’m using at home I have to unlock my phone, open a mobile app and navigate to the data I want. But even with that inconvenient data access workflow, since installing this IoT water meter, my wife and I have been able to trim our water usage by about 25% — from approximately 50 gallons each/day to 40. Our motivation for doing this was mostly just to be good citizens of the earth, but this month Los Angeles instituted the most stringent water usage rules ever. The limitation of delivering data through an app is that it takes me several steps to get to the data I need, and since I’m the techie in our household, the only way my wife knows precisely how much water we’re using is when I tell her. Ideally this information would be more easily accessible, visible and persistent for both of us. This is at the core of our research.
As I was keeping a close eye on our water use, a few nights ago while we slept, I heard some noise coming from our window. I thought my wife may have put a fan on the window because it had been a hot day. Disturbed by the noise, I woke up early that Saturday morning. It wasn’t until I walked to another part of the house that I could hear water running. Wondering if there was a connection to the window noise, I looked out my back window and saw puddles on my back porch. Once outside I could see that it was raining on our bedroom window, only it was coming from a hole that had burst through our garden hose 15 feet away. It was all coming clear. I had forgotten to turn off the hose after I watered the garden with the spray nozzle the day before. With the constant pressure on the plastic hose, it had burst open near the faucet and sprayed a shower of water right onto our bedroom window starting around 3am. This was bad.
It was especially upsetting in light of our new water saving goals. And, to underscore my error, in an instant I could now know exactly the kind of damage I had done. I quickly opened my app to see in horror that the leak had released almost 200 gallons per hour and had been leaking for 5 hours! I was totally devastated and embarrassed! All of our conservation efforts had literally gone down the drain (via the driveway)! And this was just weeks after the new City restrictions had gone into effect, making the defeat not only demoralizing, but damaging to our whole community’s conservations efforts!
As the day went on, my psychic pain started to be accompanied by my design thinking brain, I realized two things; 1) The emotional impact of this wasteful event was significantly more intense knowing specifically how much damage that I had done and 2) if our house had the kinds of data expression systems that we had proposed in our research, we might have prevented much of the loss.
The emotional impact of this wasteful event was significantly more intense knowing specifically how much damage that I had done
Buildings that Communicate
If the sounds we had heard that night were typical sounds or signs of a water leak (e.g. typical water spraying sounds or puddles on the floor), then we would have known what was happening because the building would have “communicated” to us in a common language that we have learned and understand. But there were two problems this time. The way the building “communicated” the leak was unfamiliar. In addition, the “intelligent”, machine learning-enabled device had also failed to communicate effectively. Even though within the first hour the new IoT meter was smart enough to know that there was a leak and send me a message, my phone was in “sleep mode” when the alert message was sent from the app, so it was effectively not an alert at all.
It is useful to consider here that had there been a fire in my house, our fire sensors would have detected it quickly and made a noisy ruckus to prompt fast action. Of course, fire is immediately life-threatening, but the immediacy of the threat should not be the only criteria for a building to “speak” coherently. Any excessive water or energy use should be communicated to all occupants just as clearly, reliably and quickly as the presence of a fire. There is no less at stake, there is just a different catastrophic timeline.
Any excessive water or energy use should be communicated just as clearly, reliably and quickly as the presence of a fire. There is no less at stake, there is just a different catastrophic timeline.
Short of a catastrophic event, we should know when we are not meeting our resource usage targets. There is an element of gaming at play here. I’m playing to reach or beat last month’s water use goal, and this is a useful design tool that should be leveraged to motivate people. It can even be more effective (as exercise app makers understand well) to share your goals with your community, perhaps pitting one home or office floor against another. The ultimate goal here, though, is to conserve our planetary resources by providing real-time information to building occupants and encourage conservation. The “prize” is a livable environment for us and our future generations.
In this writing series, titled Building Resource Expressions for Occupants (BREO) I will explore how we might design “smarter” buildings by giving buildings a more robust language to inform and activate the people that inhabit them. I will address how, as communities who share our built environment, we should respond to buildings that express, not only short-term emergencies, but also the long-term, slow burn of environmental destruction. I will discuss the three primary elements of building resource expression:
- What are ways buildings can express resource consumption to their occupants? How can buildings convey real-time energy and water usage to its inhabitants?
- How can we design buildings that will enable occupants to improve a building’s performance in response to these expressions of consumption.
- How might we work as a community to encourage action and improve our future environment?
As engineers, we put a lot of emphasis on using building technologies to improve building efficiency, but it is those of us who occupy buildings who benefit from the natural resources extracted for our working environment. We need to take responsibility for the resources consumed on our behalf no matter where we are, home or office. Digital technology can and should serve to bring us out of our ignorance of our building’s natural resource consumption. Once we know what is going on, we can work in concert with our digital controls to maximize the intelligence and conservation capabilities of our smart buildings. We should have a sense and even an emotional response to how our buildings perform, but until we give buildings a “voice”, we will not be able to live symbiotically with our built environment.
