Insights
What if our buildings could talk?
Achieving sentience.
Imagine a healthcare unit that modifies lighting, temperature, and sound to optimise patient recovery based on specific care needs and the time of day. Or imagine an office that recognises its occupant’s moods and responds by creating a more calming atmosphere, or adjusts the environment to promote wellbeing, demonstrating empathy and improving care.
Does this remind you of a scene from a sci-fi movie?
Shifting to the future of Digital Twins and Industry 5.0, more recent research has redirected its focus to understanding the obstacles behind the broader implementation of Digital Twins in the built environment. Within this context, studies have started to be undertaken to better understand the human-environment interaction and the potential for Digital Twins to form the basis of a Sentient Building. While previously the primary emphasis was on collecting extensive data from various sensors and sources, the true value lies in creating a bi-directional flow of information that not only allows the building to learn and adapt based on data-driven insights but also empowers users to benefit from and interact with those insights, ultimately enhancing the human experience within the building.
What is a Sentient Building?
Sentient buildings represent a holistic integration of hardware, software, and user interfaces into a single system, enhancing the two-way interaction between the building and its occupants.
As a Sentient Building, we define one that possesses an advance representation of its own context, components, and processes. It can maintain and update this representation, and it can use this representation towards real-time self-regulatory determination of its state and goals.
The concept of “sentience” provides a paradigm shift that steps from the static concept of the building as a container of human activities towards the modernist vision of “machine à habiter” of Le Corbusier, where the technology adds the capability of learning from users’ behaviour and environmental variables to adapt itself to achieve improved user comfort, energy saving, better maintenance etc.
Our Research
In Applied Research & Innovation, we explore the boundary between what is referred to as “Digital Twins” – accurate digital replicas of a physical entity – and a “Sentient Building”. The central inquiry revolves around assessing the requirements and the impact of these systems on individuals and communities. Specifically, our objective is to evaluate the consequences and construct the narrative around this new concept, examining how these systems can foster strategic, context-aware, resilient, and ultimately sustainable environments.
The challenge of evolving Digital Twins into a framework that effectively leverages a bi-directional flow of data and adds value to the everyday lives, has led us to identify four key components that are currently missing from the Digital Twin paradigm.
- Intuitive Interaction:
An intuitive interface between humans and the building systems, mirroring the natural human behaviours and interactions that people are accustomed to in their daily lives. This involves using voice commands, touch panels, gesture recognition, or even more advanced biometric interfaces. By making the interaction as natural and straightforward as talking to another person, buildings can effectively enhance user comfort and satisfaction, much like how conversational models have recently allowed users to interact with AI in a familiar and accessible manner.
- Seamless Integration:
Sentient Buildings introduce a seamless integration of diverse systems—environmental controls, security systems, and energy management, community engagement and well-being etc. The interface in buildings needs to provide a unified point of control that hides the complexity of the underlying systems but offers comprehensive functionality.
- Personalisation:
By learning from continuous interactions with occupants, buildings can adapt their environments to suit individual preferences without explicit commands. Personalisation not only enhances comfort and sense of belonging but also increases the perceived intelligence of the building, fostering a deeper connection and trust between the occupants and the building itself.
- Accessibility and User Empowerment:
Designing for inclusivity ensures that the benefits of advanced building technologies are equitably distributed. User empowerment through technology in the context of Sentient Buildings also plays a crucial role in reshaping how individuals interact with and control their spaces, enabling a successful transformation of the building from a shelter to a valuable stakeholder.
Whilst the full realisation of a Sentient Building may be a few years away, our vision is to emphasise a shift towards buildings as integrative social machines that can meld human and technological behaviours. The expansion and refinement of our approach will ensure that, as we move closer to the realisation of Sentient Buildings, we are creating environments that truly enrich human interactions and contribute positively to community well-being.
Sentient Buildings research program is a work in progress. We view this dynamic nature an essential tool in evolving our understanding, and contributions are welcomed with a view towards refining and expanding our analysis.