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Designing a 'Smart' Interior You are an interior architect who has been employed to redesign the interior of a large, old, centrally-located commercial building. The owners are planning to retrofit the building as a state-of-the-art 'smart' building in order to attract upwardly mobile, commercial tenants. The owners want the building to be both highly impressive and low impacting environmentally (by which they mean energy efficient) and want you to make recommendations for features that will highlight this. One of the 'smart' features that they seem particularly excited about are infra-red and ultra-sonic occupancy light sensors, that detect when people enter and leave rooms, turning lights on and off. These sensors fit the 'high tech' image the building now wants to communicate, but are also 'energy saving' as they ensure that only rooms being used will have lights turned on, thus solving the problem of people forgetting to manually turn lights off. A year ago you worked on a similar building with environmental consultants who revealed that there were big problems with 'smart' technologies being presented as energy saving devices, particularly when considered relationally and over time. Rather than being triggered to turn lights off, the tenants' bad habit of forgetfulness gets reinforced by the new 'smart' system. Tenants become even more used to not having to think about manually turning lights on and off, and consequently are less aware over time of the direct relation between their activities, their environments, and energy consumption. They also tend to take this lack of awareness into other environments, forgetting to turn lights off in other places because they don't have to at work. That such a design can change the culture of use was a bit of a revelation for you at the time, and since then you have been very cautious about leaping at technological responses to environmental problems particularly when they remove the agency of the user from operational systems (which is technology's way of 'solving' problems). Particularly when you put the whole picture together of 'always on' office suites and security systems, air-conditioning etc (all of which tend to go with the culture of 'smart' buildings and increase energy consumption). You decide to write a 'return brief' to the client. The return brief is a mechanism by which you are communicating back to a client what you understand the job to be, and how you will go about it. This is also an opportunity to introduce sustainable options to your client (which will also require some well placed strategic questions, backed up by persuasive and appropriate costing information: see our ReBriefing the Client tool). You want to communicate to them how 'smart' technologies tend to 'withdraw' from attention, defeating both their purpose of creating features that will make the building stand out, as well as potentially increasing energy costs. You propose instead an electronic billboard for the foyer that would indicate the building's overall energy consumption, and give users a variety of ways to engage with the operations of the building's technologies, including light-switches that are also designed as passive behavioural prompts. The idea is to achieve a more energy efficient building that is also valued by users for this quality. For
more to think about in relation to designing interiors:
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