Technology + Built Environment
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 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 […]
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 […]
You’d be forgiven for thinking PropTech was on a rocket ship. Flashy demos. AI-powered everything. A conference circuit full of optimism and matching lanyards. And yet, behind the scenes, the UK PropTech sector is beginning to show signs of fatigue. Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow, quiet unravelling that’s easy to miss if you’re […]
In the smart building industry, one of the main hurdles to achieving optimal building performance has historically been the management and interpretation of unstructured data. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have dramatically reduced this barrier. AI has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in recognising and interpreting relationships between building assets without explicit labels. For example, AI can […]
In the not-too-distant future, building owners may hold more than just high expectations – they might use the courts as a tool for enforcing design quality. As KPIs for sustainability, health and wellbeing, and community engagement shift from being woolly should-haves to baseline requirements, accountability in building design will inevitably transform. Miss these critical targets, […]
Our industry is famed for its complexity and intricate collaborations. The idea of a smart building design consultancy running on just two people might sound like a radical proposition. Yet, in our increasingly digital world, where the industry seems to have converged on a standard set of smart building capabilities, the impressive prowess of generative […]
If you’ve been in a meeting or sat through a panel about building technology lately, you’ve probably heard someone mix Building Information Modelling (BIM) with smart buildings. For those not conversant with the nuances, it’s an easy mistake to make. Both terms are steeped in digital innovation, both involve data, and—let’s be honest—are a bit […]