By Vanti
The word ‘Smart’ has been increasingly used in recent years, generally to act as a more user friendly and accessible way of presenting the Internet of Things to the general public. The idea of the ‘Smart home’ is now a fairly familiar concept, with Google data demonstrating a steady rise in activity for the term since 2013.
However, there is a great deal of vagueness and uncertainty over what ‘Smart’ actually means, and this is especially the case in the much wider field of Smart buildings. There’s currently no dictionary definition of a Smart building, though we seem to be moving towards a shared understanding that for a building to be considered ‘Smart’, it should use technology to deliver useful, consistent, user focused experiences as well as space and energy efficiencies.
We can contrast this with ‘Connected’ and ‘Intelligent’ buildings, as we’ll discuss shortly. Whilst a Smart home has a generally understood and agreed upon definition of being a residential space in which devices are connected via a central hub (think Google Home or Amazon Alexa) and easily controlled and automated, this becomes a more complicated matter when we scale up to Smart offices and other larger Smart buildings such as hotels, universities, whole apartment blocks etc.
This is in part due to the fact these spaces tend to involve a wider number and variety of systems, many of which aren’t utilised in residential environment, and the sheer size of these spaces require much more heavy-duty setups than a simple home would. For example, where a standard house will only have a handful of rooms, with a few different types of devices in each, a commercial building can include several floors containing numerous rooms and hundreds or thousands of devices and sensors.
As well as the sheer complexity of the systems that exist in Smart buildings, it’s important to note that these spaces must support much higher occupancy and usage levels than residential environments. Building operators will also have to consider how system failures or breaches such as power outages and cyber-attacks affect a space’s users, where mere seconds of downtime could critically affect a business’ operations.
This inevitably leads to a far more complicated system that supports redundancy, uninterrupted power supplies, and high levels of security – not factors that the average consumer usually considers when trying to make their home ‘Smart’.
With this in mind, it’s easy to see how simply putting a selection of devices onto the same wireless network isn’t going to cut the mustard on a commercial scale, and certainly won’t provide anywhere near the same experience as a Smart home would.
It may be useful at this point to highlight the difference between ‘Smart’ and ‘Connected’, as the two words have been used relatively interchangeably due to the lack of standardised terminology.
Connected buildings tend to feature technologies that have been plugged together, often for the benefit of owners and operators instead of occupants – think lights that automatically turn off after 60 seconds when movement hasn’t been sensed to save power, thus plunging people into darkness and resulting in inevitable arm waving or star jumps to restore functionality.
Whereas Connected buildings seem clever on the surface, they are frequently designed without considering how different groups of people actually use the building and how technology can be leveraged to help them achieve their goals.
In contrast, a Smart building is centred around the needs of the space’s users, with consultants and Master Systems Integrators frequently commencing the design stage of a project by seeking to understand exactly who will be using the building and what they’ll be doing in it.
The day-to-day ‘user journeys’ of these different groups will often be mapped out and pain points established so the design team can understand where technology can help to alleviate issues or even better, enhance people’s experience.
The level of integration is often a key point of difference between Connected and Smart buildings. Connected buildings tend to utilise technology in a fairly superficial way, for example linking lighting to motion sensors, or powering down systems at night.
Smart buildings, however, take a more integrated approach, looking at the big picture (what people are trying to achieve within the building) and working downwards so each individual device and system is considered.
This results in more useful outcomes, such as personalising a user’s experience so they can be more productive, or managing room temperatures more holistically by responding to the position of the sun and the weather that day rather than simply turning off the heating completely because the 1st of April has arrived.
At the other end of the scale we have ‘Intelligent’ buildings, which is what we will eventually achieve when technology can do even more to support occupants.
In Smart buildings, technology has been integrated in a way that helps users achieve what they need to, but the initial input for this comes from humans – the building is largely responding to external factors that have been programmed in by the commissioning team (e.g. light levels or occupancy) or initial inputs from users.
Intelligent buildings will use machine learning and AI to proactively support occupants by learning from these inputs and making decisions that will benefit users. This continuous cycle of learning, responding to feedback, and optimising will theoretically make Intelligent buildings capable of looking after themselves as well as their occupants.
