Will tomorrow's smart office be a saviour or a spy?

Over the next six weeks the BBC will examine how our built
environment is changing. Tomorrow's Buildings will look at how
technology is making our offices smarter, our homes more affordable
and even transforming building sites.
Ask someone what they dislike about working in an office and the list will
probably be long.
It is likely to include: workload, the boss, colleagues, uncomfortable chairs,
lack of light, no decent food in the canteen and Arctic air-conditioning.
Technology may soon be able to ease the last of these, offering a better
working environment by allowing workers to control their heating via a
smartphone app.
But does that come at a price? Do the sensors that are increasingly
making the office environment smarter also mean that workers are under
constant surveillance?
Welcome to the brave new world of the smart office.
Research firm Gartner predicts that commercial buildings will have more
than 500 million "connected things" during 2016.
The biggest driver for this is to improve energy efficiency - currently
commercial buildings account for 40% of the world's electricity
consumption.
By embedding hundreds of sensors in walls, ceilings or even lights, the
systems that keep the office running smoothly can be connected and in
turn these building management systems (BMS) can be connected to the
corporate network and the internet.
At Deloitte's headquarters in Amsterdam, workers can control the lights,
heating and blinds via an app, while in London building consultant Arup is
experimenting with smart desks - embedding sensors in them and hooking
them up to smartphone apps to allow people to control lighting and
heating.
Smarter systems offer huge potential energy savings - estimates range
between 20% and 50%.
"A staggering amount of energy is wasted on heating empty offices, homes
and partially occupied buildings," said Carlo Ratti, who heads up the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Senseable Cities lab.

His team is working on a project that measures the number of people in a
building and adjusts heating and lighting accordingly - with a view to
turning an empty building "off", just like a computer goes into standby
mode when not in use.
He is also working on localised heating and cooling systems, which can
provide a precise, personal climate for each occupant using "an array of
responsive infrared heating elements that are guided by sophisticated
motion tracking".
"Individual thermal 'clouds' follow people through space, ensuring
ubiquitous comfort while improving overall energy efficiency," he explained.
That will appeal to anyone who has complained about the air conditioning
and comes amid mounting evidence that people do require different
temperatures - women, for instance, feel comfortable in heat that is several
degrees higher than the ambient temperature preferred by men, according
to a study from Dutch scientists last year.
Smarter lighting or heating is all well and good when it works but, like most
technology, it isn't always fit for purpose.
Doug King, a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering and expert on
smart buildings, told the BBC: "There are lots of apocryphal stories about
lighting systems being over-ridden by cleaners who don't want to clean in
the dark or tales that, if one person is working late, the lights remain on in
large parts of the buildings.
Sinister tech?
"People will do what they have to do to get their jobs done in the level of
comfort they need and that may mean hacking the building. They may shut
off the systems by sticking Sellotape over the sensors or the building
maintenance staff may reset the controls because they simply become fed
up with all the complaints."
A case, perhaps, of smart building versus smart human.
Concerns about the smart lighting not working could pale into
insignificance next to the wider question about what data all the hidden

sensors around a building are collecting.

Architect Rem Koolhaas has spoken out against the way technology is
infiltrating buildings, saying it is "totally astonishing" that people are willing
to sacrifice their privacy for convenience and describing the rise of smart
systems as "potentially sinister".
He told Dezeen magazine that the use of smart technologies represented
the most radical shift in architectural practice for over a century - architects
had become too distracted by the benefits and overlooked the dangers.
Most building data is currently collected anonymously but that doesn't
mean it could not be used for other purposes.
"You could imagine using data from a building management system to find
out when someone is in the office and when they are not," said Mr King.
British newspaper the Daily Telegraph did just that earlier this year, fitting
under-desk sensors to measure occupancy with a view to using the data to
make the office more energy-efficient.
Staff did not see it quite that way, reacting with anger - while the National
Union of Journalists described it as "surveillance" and the trial was hastily
withdrawn, just a day after it had been announced.
It illustrates the fact that smart buildings may mean very different things to
different people.
On the one hand is the landlord, who wants to make savings on energy
and other costs, and on the other are the people who live and work in
those buildings and may not appreciate being monitored during their
working day - even if it is done anonymously.
We need to make sure technology is serving the people who work in such
buildings, thinks Arup's director of architecture Nille Juul-Sorensen.
"We have to start with the humans, putting people first and then the
technology that can help them," he said.
And Mr King said there were ways of using data to help usher in a new era
of smarter design.

"Ten years ago we were just guessing but now there is an awful lot more
data about ways people are using buildings which can be fed back to
improve the next ones," he said.
Increasingly, firms such as Deloitte and Arup are using technologies such
as virtual reality to give potential clients an idea about how a building will
look before they move in.
Ultimately, thinks Mr Juul-Sorensen, designers need to start asking even
more radical questions about how we will work in future - is it, for instance,
smart to even have an office at all in an era when the internet can connect
people in different parts of the world?
"The way we work is very different from 20 years ago and yet we are still
basing our design on the old days and then building in a lot of technology.
We are designing for the past not the future," he said.