Getting Smarter About Smart Buildings

We’re seeing renewed energy around smart buildings as organizations, their landlords, and developers consider what it will take to facilitate a mass return to physical workspaces mid- and post-pandemic. In particular, they’re thinking about how emerging technologies, beyond garden-variety sensors and apps, can be used to track employees and keep them safe. It’s increasingly possible, for instance, to analyze radio waves, like Wi-Fi, to monitor where people are and how they move — without any connection to a smartphone or other hardware.1 Employers and builders are also reconceiving optimal office design.2 A new global Smart Building Certification process is even underway.

However, in response to all this energy, one must ask: What will come of it? Is “smart” really getting smarter — and taking us where we want to go?

Smart environments have a long, deeply imperfect track record, dating back at least to the 17th century, when Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel created one of the first feedback-controlled devices: a thermostat that regulated airflow in a chicken incubator, based on temperature. Progress since then has been impressive, particularly in terms of efficiency (think energy and time savings), comfort or wellness (temperature, air quality, sound, lighting, and so on), and safety (detecting fire, revealing gas and water leaks, and other self-diagnostics).3 In that sense, we have achieved much of the promise of what were originally called intelligent (or automated) buildings at the end of the last century.4 But “smart” has also fallen short of our expectations in this century. We wanted smart homes that would work with us to anticipate and automatically address our day-to-day needs, but we’ve settled for connected homes that we manually control from our smartphones; we wanted smart cities that would run more efficiently by learning, predicting, and responding to our living patterns, but we’ve settled for large, underleveraged data sets.

There’s a pattern here, one that’s perhaps rooted in our dictionary definitions of smart. We use that word in two distinct ways, referring to human intelligence (our mental acuity) and device intelligence (tech’s capacity for predictive and independent, or automated, action).