The Internet of Everything: World of IoE Design

Use of technology has always been a defining attribute of our species.  We have used technology to reshape our environment, to increase our own innate capabilities for production, transportation, and communication. Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  A day in the life of an average person today would certainly seem like magic to someone from the 1400s, and probably to your grandparents too for that matter. Objections from magicians and pagans notwithstanding, the point is well made that each advance in technology seems to move it away from the focus of our design to an enabler of design.

Examine your daily routines closely enough and you’ll find profound technology behind the scenes of many daily experiences that we often take for granted, precisely because it is no longer the focus of the experience but merely an enabler. Today these systems mostly stand alone, but what if they could share information and resources? Today, the building can know when you are arriving. The shades can know if you’d prefer privacy or daylight harvesting.  Your hotel room can know your preferred temperature, daily schedule and favorite musician. The driver behind the Internet of Everything, or IoE, is to discover ways to use the power of networked systems to make them more intelligent. While this may seem like a complex idea today, in the not too distant future, this advanced technology will become part of our everyday lives.

The earliest version of the internet was a series of dumb terminals and servers connecting people, but IoE is about letting devices, services, and people, in short everything, communicate fluidly.  With the boom of IoE enabled devices and services, we feel it is time to take what is happening within individual silos and explore the powerful potential of networking each of the solutions together.

We believe that RTKL is ripe for this type of IoE enabled user experience design. Across the firm, different teams have already started evaluating various aspects of this. PDD gives us a framework for metrics and establishing values, a conceptual app was selected as a WIP winner, more projects are consider some level of Building Management System, most rooms are getting occupancy sensors for lighting or mechanical systems, and scheduling and digital signage systems are on the rise. Many of the individual pieces are already in place.

As designers in RTKL’s Technology Design Studio (TDS), Ernie and I are trying to figure out ways to connect the systems already in our everyday life at home, at work, and at play, to create environments that are smarter, more responsive and may even anticipate our needs.  Our goal is to explore technology not as an end goal but as an enabler of dynamic user experiences.  We have identified four scales of design that we feel can benefit from IoE enabled user experiences: individuals, spaces, facilities, and communities. There are many considerations when embarking on this kind of design from energy efficiency to time savings, from security and reliability to upfront cost versus cost savings. Fortunately, at RTKL and Arcadis we have in-house subject matter experts in almost every field impacted by the Internet of Everything.

On the individual scale, we’ll work to examine how interconnected technology shapes our experience at the most personal level, from our senses to our actions and perceptions. From smart phones to smart wearables, we are literally walking, breathing biometric data generators. At home, this cloud of technologies encourages us to improve our health and wellness by monitoring our sleep habits or telling us when we need to get up off of that couch. At work, our environment can be custom tailored not only to us, but the specific task we are completing. With a greater push towards personal work-life balance, responsive environments and mobile devices coupled with unified communication platforms breakdown the boundaries of the traditional workplace. Yet as these technologies develop, we put ourselves at ever greater risk for getting out of balance or compromising our personal data.

On the spaces scale, Ernie and I plan to dive into how technology is shaping the spaces we inhabit, i.e. our residences, workplaces, retail establishments, etc. We’ll look at how these spaces can learn from our habits and conversely, how we can learn from them. If a conference room knows when I’ve scheduled the quarterly sales meeting, can the lighting automatically adjust to my desired setting and queue up the telepresence system? Can I then look at how often that room was utilized in this capacity over the course of a year? Learning from our spaces can help allocate resources and technology purchases in the future. That said these spaces are inherently a piece of a larger picture.

As we zoom out yet another level we begin to see interconnected design in context to facilities. For decades, building automation companies such as Johnson Controls, Schneider Electric, and Honeywell have provided facility-wide solutions for automating, managing and monitoring comfort systems. But how can we go beyond temperature control to make our facilities safer, healthier, more energy efficient? Can the data captured from technologies explored in our first two scales integrate with our building-wide systems? Exploring the overlap of our in-house architects, MEP engineers, and technology designers, RTKL has an opportunity to bridge the gap and become true thought leaders in smart building design and planning.

Finally, when we zoom out to our last scale, we see the true potential for global change in our communities. When we collect and evaluate data from our community’s water, electricity, and transportation infrastructure systems, we gain the power to respond and solve common issues. When a major city opens its data to developers such as public transit, emergency response, and crime data, smartphone apps can be developed to provide a wide range of services to its citizens. And when those same citizens send data back to a city in real-time from these apps, the city can take action, creating a more transparent and connected community.

As one could imagine, the possibilities for research are endless, even for just a single scale. Our first steps in this exploration are to identify and engage our in-house subject matter experts to talk through this vision of interconnected design, and in turn identify the most exciting user experience opportunities while also listening to the most pressing concerns. The next step is to engage with leaders within these industries from Cisco, to Verizon, IBM, Honeywell and Siemens, among others, to understand what is being recommended, what is available today, and how they are addressing the concerns of RTKL and Arcadis subject matter experts.

After we have had the internal and external conversations, Ernie and I plan to put together a summary of what we have discovered, listing the most relevant points across each of the four identified scales of design. This summary will be a high level overview with the goal of prompting more discussions. Time allowing, we would like to supplement this broad internal and external survey with a specific example or use case. This use case would be a development of a single idea within a single scale of design to include specifics about how to implement the selected strategy, impacts to implementing the strategy, and risk/reward analysis of implementing the selected strategy.

Our experiences at home, at work, and at play are shaped by a vast network of related technologies helping us accomplish the most banal of chores. Given how much these technologies impact our life, shouldn’t RTKL and Arcadis designers be collaborating ahead of this trend to provide our clients with the best possible user experiences? Right now, we have a chance to be innovative and show how a multi-disciplinary team of designers can deliver amazing user experiences. Today, this is innovative. Tomorrow, it will be essential.

Connectivity is the subject of The 2014 Leonard S. Kagan Fellowship for Research and Exploration—a big topic kept purposefully loose to encourage broad thinking about the power of great ideas to bring people together. This year’s winning entries showed clarity of vision and tackle various aspects of connectivity—digital, social and physical, respectively—and all reflect an appreciation for the power of connections to give us new insights and greater control over the impact of our work. In the next few months, follow You Are Here to see the progress of these teams as they attempt to better connect RTKL to systems and information.