“Deciphering and debunking the role of technology in cities and buildings.” - that’s the headliner for Not Smart. To a greater or lesser extent, my intention with this newsletter is exactly what it says on the tin.
I’m not setting out to create marketing bumph or preach and rave about specific technologies or companies; all I really want to do is share my thoughts and deep dives into all things I find interesting (and occasionally contentious) about how we use technology in buildings and cities (a.k.a. the built environment). There are plenty of places littered about the Internet that will give you a rundown of everything you need to know regarding smart cities, buildings and everything in-between, so I’m not even going to try recreating that here.
Instead, my focus is writing long-form essays exploring and discussing topics, technologies and companies I think are worth talking about; my hope is that you’ll agree.
Who’s Kinch?
This newsletter is also not meant to be an exercise in self-promotion and branding; I have LinkedIn and my website for that, so there’s no need to bore you here too. Just to give me a small amount of credibility, I’m an engineer through and through with a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering, I’ve worked in consulting, started my own start-up in Smart Cities/Building (it’s still a baby, though), and I’m currently working towards a PhD at the University of Cambridge (related to energy and digital twins).
With that said, hopefully, I’ve convinced you of my qualifications to use buzzwords and talk about technology; if not, at least I’ve managed to convince myself…
As to why I use my surname as the author of Not Smart (by **Kinch** - if you hadn’t got it yet), the answer is simple; it’s punchier than James. For as long as I can remember, people have called me Kinch and so I figured that for the purposes of authorship, it should do nicely and is more memorable than James (literally the 27th most common name in the world).
Why Not Smart?
This is a bit of a two-parter; one, because there’s an existing newsletter called Not Boring by Packy McCormick which quite literally acted as the inspiration for me creating this newsletter, and two, because it broadly captures my sentiment (or rather anti-sentiment) towards the use of the word ‘smart’ in relation to any form of technology used within the built environment. The two combined, and Not Smart by Kinch is born.
Just as a side note, if you haven’t read Not Boring by Packy McCormick and have an interest in business, strategy, technology and finance, stop messing about and get over there.
Housekeeping
One last introductory bit before we get cracking, obviously before I can actually get paid to do this kind of thing, I still need to work and do other generally more money earning activities… Because of that, expect to have me unceremoniously arrive in your inbox every few weeks. For those keeno’s out there who love a weekly or even daily email, make do - we’re a while off that yet.
As I get rolling and regularly publishing these newsletters, it’d be great to hear from you. Be sure to leave a comment or like if you feel so inclined. If you really REALLY like this newsletter, why not share it with a friend or colleague. Tweeting about it is also acceptable.
Soooo, Smart…
I’m going to do my best to avoid smart-spamming literally everything, but in the interest of getting everyone up to speed, I’m going to do a little bit of explaining on what ‘smart’ is, where it goes, and why you might care. I’ll also make a general distinction between digital, intelligent and smart, before concluding that they’re all used frustratingly interchangeably and that they’re, in general, words that can and have been used to glitter the proverbial tech turd.
Of course, there is some utterly mind-blowing technology out there and awesome companies implementing it, but there’s also much of the opposite. For the purposes of Not Smart, we’ll steer clear of too much cynicism as it tends to obscure away from the really interesting stuff. So, to recap, we’ll cover:
What is Smart?
Where do we use Smart?
Why would (or should) we care about Smart?
Is Smart the right word?
Any questions? No, great, lets get cracking…
A quick note about Real-Estate
If you’re very new to the whole idea of smart technology and buildings, it’s probably helpful to paint a very simple picture of how real-estate (at least in the UK) works. Any real-estate developers out there, avert your eyes now.
When I’m talking about smart buildings, I’m mostly going to be focusing on the commercial real-estate (CRE) world. This world essentially treats buildings as financial assets that are invested in (a.k.a. bought) by real-estate developers, then either sold or leased to tenants in exchange for rent. Real-estate developers often have the backing of financial investors (many developers are even listed on stock exchanges), and earn money and returns in two ways.
First, they earn money from tenants. People or businesses move into the building and pay the developers money for occupying the space. I suspect most people are familiar with this concept.
Second, they sell their buildings. A developer might do this without even leasing the building, or they might do it whenever they want to liquidate some of their value. If you don’t know what liquidity is, read here.
There are many other bits to this process, but basically, just know the two main goals of a real-estate developer is to maximise the amount of money they earn from tenants and maximise the value of their buildings. The importance of this should become apparent as you read further, but to jump the gun a little, smart buildings should help real-estate developers achieve these goals better than non-smart buildings (but they often don’t… this is kinda the reason Not Smart was born).
Cities are more than just Buildings.
Also, before we get in to the nitty-gritty of what smart actually is, know that I’m going to explain smart across two scales; buildings and cities.
For buildings, remember how real-estate works. For cities, throw it out of your mind; we’ll being dealing with institutions and governments here, not commercial real-estate.
What is Smart?
Well, we’re really starting with an existential one here. Obviously, when I’m going to be talking about smart, I’m talking about it from the perspective of the built environment (i.e. buildings and cities), but even within that relatively narrow remit, it’s very difficult to pin down one single definition for what smart actually is. The concept of having digital technology as part of the built environment has been around for about as long as we’ve had digital technology. The key step towards ‘smart’ as we might understand it today was with Building Management Systems (BMS’s), which came on to the block around in the 1970’s and were birthed from the world of industrial automation (no real surprises there - SPOILERS this is how most building technology ended up on the scene).
BMS’s are today a rather unexciting but very necessary piece of hardware and software the essentially run most of the operational systems within a building, e.g. heating, ventilation and air-conditioning. As an analogy, a BMS is essentially like the brain of a building… just not a very high-IQ one…
The use of BMS’s in buildings (particularly big ones) has become pretty standard practice as they offer a really easy way of having a basic level of control over the building systems. They allow building operators to schedule the on/off of different systems, which can help reduce energy consumption and make the building more comfortable for the people inside. There is nuance between how we control an office building as compared to, say, a residential building, but we’re not going to delve in to that just yet…
As a next step towards the smartification of the built environment, and closely coupled with the mass-production of low-cost microprocessors (just think computer chip) and sensors, smart lighting became the new byword for smart. Lighting systems are one of the most pervasive systems in a building (you install lighting everywhere), and it offers a really easy system to bolt on sensors that might tell you something interesting about your building.
Companies like Enlighted (among others) developed a concise and convincing market offering that proposed a really easy way to add some smartness to a building as part of a general lighting offering. In Englighted’s case, building operators can develop a clear understanding of how people move around and use the building all the while making considerable savings on their lighting energy bill just through some fairly simple control optimisation.
What followed the boom in smart lighting then became an explosion in any and every bit of technology that could go into a building being labelled as smart building technology. And honestly, it’s a bit overwhelming.
Building owners can now buy their building an app, they can install location tracking, they can deploy machine learning to control their building HVAC systems, they can have targeted advertising, and they can have facial recognition to control who and when people enter a building. This not even mentioning the literal thousands of other things building owners can (but maybe shouldn’t) do with their buildings.
As you might imagine, with so much on the table, the smart building market has developed two inconvenient characteristics:
Many smart building products and services and indistinguishable from one another.
Many smart building products and services don’t do what they say on the tin.
Needless to say, it’s a minefield. A minefield that Not Smart is going to hopefully, help you navigate.
If you’re a real-estate developer (or even a consultant) and you’re gasping for how to deliver smart more than an explanation of what smart is, I’ve actually already written a paper with a few colleagues on what this might look like. Yes, it’s 5000 words (sorry not sorry). And yes, it was published in an academic journal. See Here. If you can’t get access (because you’re likely not an academic), email me and I’ll send you a copy -> james AT kinch DOT consulting
A note about Energy
Energy is a really central part of why people are looking to technology within the built environment; if we had limitless and impact-free energy, the industry probably wouldn’t have such urgency to leverage silicon chips to change how buildings and cities are run. That said, the world of energy extends a long way out from a single building and includes a large a very complex web of infrastructure and technologies.
As much as I would love to deep-dive into energy in my first article (it is the subject of my PhD research after all), I think it might be best to keep it back for a more focused discussion. So before you go thinking ‘Ahhhh, but wait one minute, WHAT ABOUT EN….’ - remember, it’s coming.
Where do we use Smart?
Smart buildings/cities are really just a byword for ‘digital technology’ used in the built environment. And when we’re talking built environment, we really talking about buildings and infrastructure across a bunch of different scales. So, answering ‘where do we use Smart?’, well, anywhere where there are buildings or pieces of infrastructure.
However, the concept of scale is absolutely essential to understanding why and how you might want to use technology in any given context. As you move from one scale to the next, the complexity and interdependencies increase:
A Building: I only care about how this building operates and how people use it.
A Portfolio of Buildings: I care not just about each individual building, but I want to understand how my buildings interact and where there might be opportunities.
A City: I need to understand how all buildings interact as an ecosystem, AND I care about how people live and experience.
A Country: I care about how people live and experience, and I care about how nationwide policy can be informed by holistic and abstract data sets.
In very general terms then, technology has very different implications depending on the scale at which the data it generates is observed. This is a factor that is really important to have in mind when implementing technology; there is no point having millions of sensors in a small area if what you’re trying to understand is at a city or country scale.
Why would (or should) we care about Smart?
Why you would or even should care about smart isn’t a difficult question to answer, but it would be wrong to assume that the answer is the same for every person asking the question. There is not overarching reason for why smart technology is important, more a bunch of reasons that change depending on the context.
Reflecting on the different scales of smart I just mentioned, reasons to care about smart technology could be:
A Building: I care about smart technology because it allows me to reduce the energy consumption of my buildings (reducing cost), and because I can implement some really cool technology that makes the lives of the people that use the building much easier.
A Portfolio of Buildings: I care about smart technology because it allows me to optimise how I managed and allow people to use my buildings; this in turn reduces the cost of operating and maintaining the buildings.
A City: I care about smart technology because it allows me to better manage how people move within my city, this allows me to reduce congestion and pollution generated by cars and increase the speed at which people move from one place to another.
A Country: I care about smart technology because it allows me to managed how I generate, store, and distribute power across my country, hence allowing me to use more renewable energy sources.
There are of course many other reasons why someone (or something) might care about smart, but these just illustrate how these reasons can really vary depending on the context. Even within a specific scale the reason for caring about smart can be drastically different for different people and stakeholders.
Is Smart the right Word?
Well, finishing off with a big one. On this count, I’m going to cop-out and make the call that really, the wording doesn’t really mater and it’s more of a issue for the marketing team than it is for technologists.
Be it Smart, Digital, Intelligent or whatever, there really isn’t a distinguishing feature of any of these tags - other than perhaps the occasional cringing facial expression of an engineer or client whose been burned by a project flying under the banner of one of these words in the past.
Nevertheless, don’t be fooled, great and terrible projects have been delivered under all threes of these tags - take your pick and stay consistent.
Disclaimer
I have a few associations with academic institutions and corporate companies. As a result, it’s important that I outline that any and all views expressed on this website are my own and do not represent the views of any organisation I work with, for or have an affiliation to.
Thanks
Will all of this said, I just wanted to thank you, my early-adopter reader for sticking with this article the whole way through. As mentioned above, I’d love to hear from you so find me through socials (twitter -> @jamesikinch, LinkedIn -> @jamesikinch) and send me any questions or thoughts you have.
Otherwise, I’ll catch you soon in the next one.