How Buildings can become Truly Smart using Experience-Tech

What has changed in buildings over the past 10 years? Some experts suggest a lot has changed – building have become smart - and some experts suggest nothing has. How many smart buildings you think exist around the world? I’ll come back to this question later in this article.

Buildings are perceived as smart when a lot of sensors are involved and when more and more devices are connected to the internet, replacing physical switches by online apps (smart platforms). The question is: is this smart?

What’s the point of digitalizing functions if nothing really improves?

The notion that my smart phone today has more computing power than was needed to get Neil Armstrong to the moon in the 60’s is mind-boggling. Nevertheless, my digital alarm clock in one of my mobile apps has a similar function as the alarm clock my grandmother used, for example to wake up to watch Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon on television. 

What’s the point of digitalizing functions if nothing really improves? I have repeatedly asked myself. In my opinion the world will not change for the better if we continue to code individual functions such as the alarm clock into smart platforms. I believe the power and added value of smart platforms is the possibility to connect the multiple functions I need in my daily journey to increase my productivity, wellbeing and comfort.

The reason my alarm clock app is still not smart, is because it is designed as an …… alarm clock. It doesn’t wake me up to be in time at my first appointment by itself. If it were designed to execute such tasks, it would use my location and the location of my first appointment, read the weather forecast and find the correlating traffic behaviour. Finally, after aggregating the data it would automatically set the best wake up time and immediately provide me with useful travel information.

Having previously mentioned notion in mind, how many truly smart buildings do exist around the world?

To make smart buildings work for you we at Royal HaskoningDHV have developed a process which is called Experience-Tech. With this process we connect your experience and process flow with relevant technologies to optimize your business results using meaningful and human-centric solutions. This means we put the experience flow first, before we start engaging with eco-systems and designing infrastructures

This seems a simple process, however the opposite is true in my experience. Typically, concrete user cases are late in the process, and consequently IT and data design as well. In projects we should pull these steps forward and make them together the starting point of a design rather than the other way around. In recent projects with some leading multinationals and technology companies, we have learned to overcome these challenges. We take the customer journey and user cases as a starting point: we developed an information- and interaction model, defined the requirements and selected the best vendors and technology based on that. This way of working helped us to become more concrete. Moreover, it speeds up the process for building installations and it focuses more on the value of the connected journey rather than discussing about apps and technology. 

This is exactly what Royal HaskoningDHV sets out to do in more projects and in more markets. Since we are often engaged in projects from the early start and are typically responsible for the construction process, we are well positioned to make this change. So, that’s what we will do!

If you would like to know more about our approach, please contact me on LinkedIn or by respond to the twitter blog.   

Onno Willemse

Twitter: @RHDHV / @OnnoWillemse