October 12, 2015 - Building Automation
By Ken Sinclair
Our new tools of social engagement allow us to rapidly and continuously quantify as never before the measured variables of "Satisfaction" and "Well Being" in our buildings.
We all understand how important these factors are to the productivity within our buildings. Our passion and actions will define a new industry using social engagement to quantify "satisfaction" and "well being" using connection, analytic, and achievement assessment.
As we demonstrate our belief and share our passion with our early adopter clients, we all will grow in the creation and understanding of adding the never before quantified social feeling and wellbeing of buildings. The systems we create to do this are revolutionary in the information we collect and the interaction we achieve changing the landscape of buildings.
These new occupant driven buildings created by this new approach and its direct feedback will take on a new form. The new paradigm will lead with driving sustainability beyond the building in transportation, hotelling of office space, and personal greenness. These buildings will morph into reflections of a strong shared social vision for each building driven by the occupants. A software campus approach and feeling will evolve where the occupant is the highest valued resource in the building. Their spaces will evolve to working cafes, open spaces, green space, and video conferencing theaters, driven by the social feeling and interaction of the occupants of the buildings.
Old buildings will evolve to demonstrate their new social driven life and their occupants proudly sharing their achievements that they have prevented the footprint that would occur to replace these buildings.
Our early adopter clients will help us share our dream as we mock up our first social engagements and mutually refine them to achieve the successes we all know we can achieve.
We have been talking about measuring productivity for a long time from this 2003 review of one presentation: Environmental Quality and the Productive Workplace by Professor Derek Clements-Croome was a smorgasbord of global resources on productivity in the workspace.
I am intrigued with the new evolving measured variables in the industry: productivity, wellbeing, happiness, and satisfaction and how these will overshadow energy if we can document with social media. But are existing social media platforms the best way of measuring satisfaction? How do you separate opinion from fact? Not sure... but we all need to explore this mountain of transformational change together.
The links to the articles below in my review provide a head shake for us all to begin our transformational change.
Our early adopter clients will help us share our dream as we mock up our first social engagements and mutually refine them to achieve the success we all know we can achieve.
My lead article link speaks well to my subject. The Edge is also the "greenest building in the world," according to British rating agency BREEAM, which gave it the highest "sustainability" score ever awarded: 98.4 percent. The Dutch have a phrase for all of this: het nieuwe werken, or roughly, the new way of working. It’s about using information technology to shape both the way we work and the spaces in which we do it. It’s about resource efficiency in the traditional sense — the solar panels create more electricity than the building uses — but it’s also about the best use of the humans.
• The Smartest Building in the World: Inside the connected future of architecture, by Tom Randall, Sept. 23, 2015. "It knows where you live. It knows what car you drive. It knows who you’re meeting with today and how much sugar you take in your coffee. (At least it will, after the next software update.) This is the Edge, and it’s quite possibly the smartest office space ever constructed."
• "As the pioneer of Wellness Real Estate and founder of the WELL Building Standard, Delos is transforming our homes, offices, schools and other indoor environments by placing health and wellness at the center of design and construction decisions. The Delos platform includes research, consulting, real estate development and innovative solutions for the built environment – creating spaces that nurture and promote human health and well-being."
• BIM Designed - Certified Green - Carbon Neutral. "To evaluate and measure the satisfaction of human need within a building, wellbeing, a holistic framework has been adapted by Model IB (www.modelib.com) from the works of Professor Max-Neef in 'Human Scale Development: Conception, Application and Further Reflections.' The resultant ‘Human need satisfier web’ defines areas within which relative questions can be developed and put to a broad range of people associated with the building – architects, designers, consultants, users, occupants, facility managers, community members and so on – and their collective response captured and assessed."
• Socially Driven HVAC Control System: What is this Technology? "The socially driven web-based thermostat is a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) control system that enables office building occupants to control their thermal environment through a mobile device or web page. The software collects and processes occupant preferences in a 'social networking /gaming' environment; artificial intelligence technologies then calculate the most efficient way to satisfy those preferences using the building’s HVAC system."
• Measuring Happiness. "It’s notoriously hard to measure comfort and productivity. People have done awesome work in this area, but the reality is that productivity means different things to different people, especially for knowledge workers like many people who work in creative fields, technology fields, etc. And yet, we all know that where we work matters."
• Diagnosing 'Sick' Buildings to Save Energy. The Building Science & Engineering Group at Drexel University "is developing a powerful tool that can analyze the big data generated by various components in building control systems — thermostats, air and water flow sensors, and energy meters for example — alert building operators when there is a problem, which is often difficult to notice without assistance, and suggest options for fixing it. The goal is not only to have happier building occupants, but also to cut down on the inefficient energy use for which buildings have become notorious."
• A technical framework to describe occupant behavior for building energy simulations by William J.N. Turner & Tianzhen Hong, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. ABSTRACT: "Green buildings that fail to meet expected design performance criteria indicate that technology alone does not guarantee high performance. Human influences are quite often simplified and ignored in the design, construction, and operation of buildings. Energy-conscious human behavior has been demonstrated to be a significant positive factor for improving the indoor environment while reducing the energy use of buildings. In our study we developed a new technical framework to describe energy-related human behavior in buildings. The energy-related behavior includes accounting for individuals and groups of occupants and their interactions with building energy services systems, appliances and facilities."
• Engaging Building Occupants to Improve Sustainability Performance by Josh Radoff, Co-founder and Principal of YR&G sustainability consultants. "A sustainability initiative is only as successful and meaningful as its ability to improve performance and drive positive change within a building or organization. Increasingly, we are realizing that performance in the form of energy and water efficiency, waste diversion, improved human health and quality of living, etc. – is only in part a function of the technologies installed in a given facility. It is equally dependent on the extent to which owners, operators, occupants and employees are engaged in actively participating in the effort to improve the sustainability of the building or organization."
• A performance assessment ontology for the environmental and energy management of buildings. ABSTRACT: "Narrowing the performance deficit between design intent and the real-time environmental and energy performance of buildings is a complex and involved task, impacting on all building stakeholders. Buildings are designed, built and operated with increasingly complex technologies. Throughout their life-cycle, they produce vast quantities of data. However, many commercial buildings do not perform as originally intended. This paper presents a semantic web based approach to the performance gap problem, describing how heterogeneous building data sources can be transformed into semantically enriched information. A performance assessment ontology and performance framework (software tool) are introduced, which use this heterogeneous data as a service for a structured performance analysis. The demonstrator illustrates how heterogeneous data can be published semantically and then interpreted using a life-cycle performance framework approach. A performance assessment ontology for the environmental and energy management of buildings."
• Lighting for Healthcare Applications. This article describes a project that Francis Rubinstein did with California Lighting Technology Center back in 2010 when he led the LBNL Lighting Group. "Since LED lighting at that time was not bright enough to meet healthcare requirements, CLTC focused on demonstrating hybrid solutions that combined RGB LEDs with fluorescent lamps in the same luminaire. They also designed spectrally controllable lighting for a small office which could be color-tuned over a large range. Now, in 2015, one could do all this with LED luminaires, but then it was way ahead of its time!"
• CRI Modulation: Future Lighting Control Strategy? by Craig DiLouie, Sept. 25, 2015.
"LED lighting has made a new dimension of lighting control, color tuning, widely available. By mixing separately dimmable arrays of warm- and cool-white, saturated colors (RGB+A) or a mix of the two, correlated color temperature (CCT) can be tuned manually or automatically based on various application needs."
There is a lot to absorb in this new way of thinking to make the needed transformational change in our industry but, if we can achieve and document satisfaction and wellbeing and their respective connection to productivity, we will create a new value proposition and a new industry based on our traditional skill set.
Ken Sinclair is the founder, owner, and publisher of an online resource called AutomatedBuildings.com. He writes a monthly column for FacilitiesNet.com about what is new in the Internet of Things (IOT) for building automation.
