Why a new perception of "environments" is the next big disruption

In my daily work, there's one thing I'm dealing with constantly: Environments for people. I have the privilege to look at it from different angles everyday: Living environments, working environments, environments for cooperation, environments to sell products - and many more. But not only do we build environments, we work passionately towards a bigger purpose: Making the best out of them. Making people the environments are built for far more successful, healthy or social. Consciously looking at all the initiatives that already exist - "new work" environments, innovative hospitality environments, and also the experience driven approach in retail, I think we still heavily underestimate what environments will evolve to and what they will be able to do for us in years from now.

Read the points below to find out my opinion on the factors enabling the next big disruption wave - a wave that will profoundly revolutionize the way we perceive and consequently build our environments.

Imagination

With new developments in many established and technology driven industries, it is almost stunning that there are no real disruptive approaches for buildings and interiors on the market yet. The automotive industry is throwing fully automated vehicles on the market; the production industry is in the middle of a next industrial revolution; other industries are heavily investigating into robots, AI, neuronal networks and self-learning technologies. I am totally sure that with all these super high-tech developments in many markets, the imagination for implementing technology and automation in our daily lives - and not only via our smartphones, smart fridges or smart vacuum cleaners, but far more profound, directly into built our environments, will either reach us very soon and intense, or sneak into our world in an subtle way over time. I am working towards both ways.

Value Add

Along with the imagination for where our environments can go and what they will do for us comes the question of why. What value do we have by changing the places we're living in disruptively? Let's take the example of the environments that is pictured in below video. LG shows its vision of how OLED displays add value to our environments in future. How flexible, immediate and natural our work process could become if only the technology would support us intuitively, automatically and seamless. I think one major factor that LG presents here will be hitting us in many ways: Technology will break out of the forms we know. Even though this video has a strong visionary, emotionalizing and marketing aspect in it, I still find it inspiring and mind-opening. Imagine only small parts of this will come to life. Our lives will change dramatically, and mostly in a positive way.

Complexity

Coming back to today's reality: One reason why we're still waiting for the big disruption in the building industry certainly is the factor of complexity. With a product like a phone, car, or computer, the approach for innovation is much easier than innovating an entire big scale ecosystem like a building or room. There are many influencing factors in the system of a building that could be innovated - and many players that would have to play a role and have to be synchronized. And then who will pay for all the technology, where comes a return of invest from? This complexity and the lack of knowledgeable system integrators that are able to be creative, then do the building job and at the same time also integrating technology with all its risks and hiccups is a major reason why most of our environments basically still work like they did ages before, just in different forms and colors.

Data, Science & Engineering

In the end, the change of how we perceive our environments will be started and enabled with these three. As soon as there's a crystal clear, data-validated proof that disrupting our environments will make a major positive difference in our lives, the step to the engineering part where this new world is actually developed will probably happen quickly. Speaking for myself, I'm totally curious how my workplace will look like in 20 years - and I am so glad I can participate in inventing it.