Technology + Built Environment
Smart Building Magazine Column, The Smart Chronicles
It feels like most of the smart building investment being planned at the moment is going into buildings that are already smart…and that’s worth paying attention to. For a decade the “cool” work was always new build. A wonderful clean sheet of paper to specify what you wanted and hand over something that was clever […]
I’ve been re-reading a 2018 book this month, Human + Machine, and one figure keeps nagging at me. It sets out four architectures for how AI amplifies people at work… one agent applied to big data for one human, one agent serving a group of humans, several agents amplifying a single human, and multiple agents amplifying […]
As an industry, our modus operandi has been to connect everything to everything else. Plant, sensors, access control, lifts, lighting, room booking, visitor management, energy platforms, workplace apps, tenant experience tools, you name it, we integrated it. And good job we did, AI enablement needed it! The commercial case for doing so sounded sensible enough: […]
The distinction between smart buildings and smart cities is often framed as one of ambition: cities are simply “bigger”, more complex versions of buildings, aren’t they? In practice, this assumption has proven unhelpful. The real difference is not scale alone, but the qualitative shift in complexity that occurs as we move from buildings to cities, […]
For years, the panacea of smart buildings has been framed around interaction. Tap here. Log in there. Adjust this. Override that. A quiet assumption sat beneath it all – that people would be willing participants in the digital lives of their buildings. They sorta were. But increasingly, they won’t be. Gen Z and Alpha are […]
The smart buildings industry did something genuinely impressive over the last decade. Faced with fragmented supply chains, overlapping scopes, and technologies falling between trades, it created a delivery construct that mostly worked. The Master Systems Integrator brought clarity to capital projects. It defined accountability, reduced chaos, and made it possible to deliver increasingly complex smart […]
In January, I usually look to the future. But winter has a way of slowing you down. Fewer distractions. Sharper thinking. On cold mornings, I like to imagine a walk through a small, fictional graveyard. Not of people, but of smart building and smart city technologies that once mattered deeply, worked remarkably well, and are […]
Smart buildings are becoming sophisticated enough that we’re finally allowed to ask awkward questions. Not “can it optimise my HVAC?” or “will the dashboard impress leadership?”, but something slightly more philosophical: what happens when the intelligence we’ve embedded starts smoothing reality in ways we don’t fully see? Not maliciously, not Skynet-in-a-plant-room, just… systemically. Most optimisation […]
The current wave of AI lives in documents, emails, and dashboards. The next wave will live in space. Embodied AI means software plus sensors plus motors operating in the real world: machines that can see a corridor, decide what to do, and act on it without waiting for a human. Once AI can move, buildings […]
There’s a moment in every smart building project when the confetti settles and reality walks in. The app works. The dashboards load. Then, within weeks, the control room drifts back to radio calls and spreadsheets. The gap isn’t technological, it’s operational. That’s why the most valuable deliverable on any PropTech programme isn’t a feature list, […]