Trillions of Connected Devices: A Digital AEC Business

I wrote this article in 2013 with the hope that we would see the design community take this on as a design tool opportunity. Very few saw the vision. In today's world, building manufacturers like Lutron have provided leadership to this concept. Enjoy the read.

We are in the midst of a seismic shift in the AEC industry that is staring right at us, yet the subtly of this shift is very powerful due to its transparency.  We are talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) where trillions of connected devices will bring shocking change and provide untold opportunities and tremendous challenges for your AEC business.

A major and immediate strategic challenge for your AEC business is in its transition into being a digital business.  A digital business used to be defined by how your business was leveraging computer processes, software and hardware.  This is no longer the only measure. Being a digital business in today’s world involves being connected to data and relevant information through devices and “things”, not just through a computer.  The growth of smartphones and tablets, essentially supercomputers in your pocket, is a first phase of turning your information inside out.  Since the majority of work in the AEC industry is performed outside of your office, this trend of emancipating your data to work both inside your office and out in the field is a wonderful alignment and milestone moment for our industry.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, there are over 6 billion cell phones in use today.  There are also 10 billion microprocessors that are manufactured each year that are being put into everything from appliances to cars and everything in between.  The world will have over a trillion devices that can connect with each other within the next year.  To put perspective into this invisible revolution of a trillion connected devices, a trillion seconds is 30,000 years.  The exciting thing of this connection of devices is not just about smartphones and tablets talking with each other, it’s the connection of mundane, everyday things like dishwashers, clothes, doors, windows and furniture. 

We are entering the era of pervasive computing, where designers, constructors and all of us in the AEC industry will be challenged with new design solutions, new methods of construction, new workplaces and new professionals.  For the first time in history, we are being exposed to immediate and factual feedback loops between things.  For instance:

·         Your building will have the intelligence to perform preventive maintenance and self-healing on itself based on real-time measures like normal wear and tear over time, incident damage and sabotage

·         Constructors will have many potentially hazardous building systems built in the field by drones that seamlessly adapt to ever changing field conditions based on immediate feedback from materials, people and environmental conditions

·         Surfaces of a bathroom will “gang up” and begin to lobby to be cleaned, not according to a set schedule, but on a needs basis, saving time and money for facility managers

Performance of materials and people are now going to be the ultimate measure of usage, success or failure, not clever marketing or branding.  This will bring substantial change as products and systems will form their own kind of social networking, sometimes with unusual alliances and sometimes with discovering new “friends”.  Sensors and equipment like Apple’s iBeacon (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6048) and Google’s Nest (https://nest.com/) are beginning to provide enormous amounts of data that is moving from being called Big Data to Infinite Data.  As this data matures over time and is communicated between things, your product development, marketing and business development teams will need to level silos and find new ways of working with your customers, partners and competitors.  This will bring the inevitable need to listening to your customers better, even inviting them into your processes earlier than you do now.

A new palette of design options, new and safer ways of constructing and improved facility management are now possible with the Internet of Things. What a wonderful time to be in the AEC business.