Short Summary for a Quick Glance:
Reflecting on a recent viral LinkedIn ‘rant’ that exposed fundamental flaws in a proposed Smart Buildings Overlay, this article unpacks the critical disconnects between design, construction, and operation. Using the ‘six blind men and the elephant’ parable, it illustrates how narrow industry perspectives, particularly from areas like enterprise networking, impede holistic smart building development. The piece advocates for an operationally-driven, ‘design to manage’ approach, urging the sector to embrace true collaboration and action learning to bridge the vital gap between building intent and lived experience.
The Day I Ranted About Smart Buildings – And Why It Mattered
Just over a month ago, I published what some might call a “rant” on LinkedIn. This critique, initially prompted by Ceri Williams’s smart building overlay to the RIBA Plan of Works, gained significant traction. My initial post alone garnered nearly 40,000 views, 97 likes, and 38 comments. Looking back, while it might not have been my most measured moment, it certainly put me on the map as a voice to be reckoned with, compelling a deeper reflection on a critical industry challenge.
What truly struck and frankly “flabbergasted” me, prompting that impassioned response, was a specific statement within that overlay (see PDF here):
“Stages 5, 6 and 7 are not significantly sensitive to the Smart Digital Building domain. Buildings and Campuses are inherently complex capabilities with industry standard frameworks and methods that address the complexity of many diverse interrelated components and parties.”
For context, Stages 5, 6, and 7 of the RIBA Plan of Work relate to Manufacturing & Construction, Handover, and Use. This assertion seemed to fly in the face of conversations I was consistently having with stakeholders across the smart buildings ecosystem.
The sheer disconnect was astonishing because, just two days prior to Ceri Williams’s article formally appearing in Smart Buildings Magazine on April 19th, 2023, I had co-facilitated a significant roundtable 2 days earlier kindly hosted by Cisco themselves at their London City HQ. This discussion, focused on “Retrofitting buildings and the drive towards net zero,” brought together an influential group of developer, owner, and operator participants, including representatives from British Land, Landsec, Patrizia, CBRE, WiredScore, the Department of Education, Canary Wharf Group, and Arup.
My insights from this roundtable are available on in a previous post and there was an accompanying article also published in Smart Buildings Magazine on May 15th:
My immediate reaction to discovering Ceri’s overlay content was “WTF?” – I had just run a major roundtable at Cisco’s London HQ with some of their most important clients saying the exact opposite of this overlay, and no one there had mentioned him or any such collaboration with RIBA. This immediately prompted the question: who exactly had he been talking to?
Several key takeaways from that very roundtable directly contradicted the statement in Ceri’s overlay:
- Sustainability as the Primary Driver: There was strong consensus that sustainability, primarily driven by energy efficiency, was the fundamental impetus for retrofit projects, heavily involving the ‘Use’ stage.
- The Critical Role of Operations and the Skills Gap: We noted a critical disconnect between ‘Operations-led’ and ‘User Experience-led’ approaches, highlighting the urgent need for operators to be involved earlier in smart building specification. This discussion pinpointed where the project-operations gap first appears, underscoring the sensitivity of Stages 6 and 7 (Handover and Use).
- Agility and Prototyping in Retrofit: Learnings from rapid prototyping in retrofit, driven by operational needs, were seen as crucial for informing technology templates in new build projects. This emphasis on practical, data-driven feedback from the ‘Use’ phase forms the core of a “design to manage” philosophy, which directly refutes the idea that later stages are not sensitive.
My initial LinkedIn post was part of a series of “ranting and raving” ones I published between late April and mid-May, also questioned the transparency and breadth of engagement in the overlay’s development. I asked about the involvement of various trade bodies and accreditation organisations, and why specific operational technology and IoT vendors seemed absent from the conversation. The sheer volume of likes and comments, including from a “who’s who” of industry leaders, affirmed that my frustrations were widely shared. Many were equally “flabbergasted” by the apparent disconnect.
In a follow-up post not long after, which surprisingly gained less than 10% of the views of the original but was, for me, far more interesting, I used the ancient parable of the six blind men and the elephant to spell out the core problem. The Smart Buildings space is remarkably reminiscent of that parable because each stakeholder group maps their experience and often blinkered view onto what is a vast and complex ecosystem, believing their partial perspective represents the whole.
Consider, for example, the perspective of enterprise networking. Their focus is often on simply connecting RJ45 connectors to switches. Crucially, they may have no real idea what’s at the other end, particularly from an Independent Data Layer point of view. They are typically not involved in what happens in tenant experience or building operations and maintenance once everything is connected. To them, data is merely what passes through cables and switches; they don’t necessarily engage with the data model or asset register. Their primary concern is network functionality and security. This limited perspective is precisely why significant innovation isn’t primarily driven from the enterprise networking side, as they are not typically master systems integrators who bridge the critical gap between design and build teams and the platform and app providers who need the data, or those who ultimately use it.
The sheer volume of engagement with my critique, and my subsequent delving into these fragmented industry perspectives, led to a more fundamental question: is the Smart Buildings Overlay the real problem that needs solving, or merely an “expedient Elastoplast” allowing the AEC industry to avoid deeper, more fundamental questions about who does what, how, when, where and why? I observed that despite numerous proposed frameworks, many still try to fit into the existing RIBA stages, rather than fundamentally rethinking the process based on lived experience.
This highlighted a critical disconnect: the lived experience of those who operate and use smart buildings is seemingly not part of an “action learning” process that feeds back effectively to those who design them. This is largely because designers often “walk away at practical completion (if not before)”. This systemic flaw, I argued, is why so much of the specified technology spectacularly fails. As someone with a background in human-centred design, I struggle to think of other domains where the user’s lived experience is so disconnected from the design process. Construction projects have clear beginnings and ends, but smart buildings are arguably only truly “smart” when in use.
This entire experience ultimately catalysed my thinking around how to facilitate these “what if” questions – questions about how we might approach smart buildings if the existing RIBA Plan of Works didn’t exist, and if there might be better ways to do so. This includes exploring concepts like “design for management,” as described by Andrew Child at Knight Frank, or “design to manage,” as my former colleague George Davies similarly put it. The overwhelming response to my posts demonstrated a definite appetite for this type of discussion and participation, suggesting a clear need to feed operational learnings back into the design process, perhaps through a blurring of lines between design and deployment.
Looking back, my initial ranty post wasn’t just an expression of my views; it was a demonstration of my commitment to fostering “deep meaningful conversations” that drive the industry forward. It ultimately reinforced my belief that true market engagement comes from asking uncomfortable questions and being willing to lead the dialogue.
