Dutch developer EDGE has become synonymous with smart, sustainable building design over the last five years.
When the EDGE in Amsterdam opened its doors in 2015, it hit headlines across the globe. The most sustainable building in the world at the time of its launch, it was also the smartest and one of the first examples of an app-controlled office development.
This was a building that promoted “a radical new way of working”. It could control the temperature around employees’ desks based on their preferences, remember how they took their coffee and guide them to a workspace pre-selected to fit their needs, based on their diary for the day.
It is easy to forget that, five years ago, this was groundbreaking stuff. As a result, the EDGE and latterly the new EDGE Olympic – often referred to as the EDGE 2 – have put Amsterdam on the map for commercial real estate innovation.
And it has paid off in a way no one would ever have predicted or, indeed, would ever have wanted to see the buildings tested. In the midst of the pandemic, EDGE was able to invite tenants safely back into its Amsterdam buildings by late May, way before many other companies and cities had even contemplated a widespread return to work. The ability to move so quickly and so early came down to building data and a pre-existing network of sensors and other key technologies.
Here, EDGE’s product excellence director Sandra Gritti explains exactly how the developer has got its workforce safely, and happily, back to the office and advises companies looking to replicate this approach to smart building solutions on where to start.
Let’s start with the big question. How has your use of building data been crucial over the last few months during the pandemic in terms of navigating a return to work?
There are two things you want to be primarily sure of when returning to work during the pandemic: social distancing and ventilation. If you have two people in a room for an hour, for example, you need to make sure this doesn’t create a hotspot where the virus can easily spread. There are two ways in which we can leverage sensoring: is the room properly ventilated and is there enough space for people to keep a safe distance? We are using our occupancy and people counting capabilities and our air quality capabilities to measure these two things. We are bringing that data to the employees when they arrive at the office. When you arrive at the office there are screens up in the entrance that show how busy the building is, how occupied each floor is, where the available meeting rooms are and does it have enough fresh air in it or is it still stale from the last meeting? We are also able to detect when there are too many people in one room to allow for social distancing so we can stop people congregating in spaces that are too small. Equally, if we see the Co2 level has gone over a certain amount, we know the HVAC system can’t handle that so we would ask people to step out, go and get a coffee and wait for the air quality to return to a safe level. We have tablet screens in every room that will communicate all of this information to the user with a red pop-up alert.
And presumably this is all data that can continue to be used long term rather than just being a temporary reaction to a moment in time?
Yes, and we were using it all before. The sensors we use are the same and the data we collect hasn’t changed. The only thing that has changed is the criteria on which we give information to people. If you are on a journey for smart, you should not just be trying to solve the problem of Covid. You should be thinking about how you leverage it for the future, so the investment becomes a long-term one. The data you will be collecting now will have a very useful long-term use case.
How should a developer or occupier looking to build up its smart credentials tackle the current crisis with a focus on long-term gain?
Taking air volumes as an example, we have always had very high volumes of air per person and we don’t use recycled air and those things are so good for people on a cognitive level and should be the sort of thing buildings are looking at in a pandemic or not. After what has happened, though, people will want to see evidence that buildings are safer and healthier than ever, and this is a good place to start. It also means that small particles like viruses can’t spread as easily so you do reduce the chance of a spread.
There are still questions raised around privacy and sensors and data collection. While this is likely to reduce somewhat as there is a focus on making buildings safer and healthier, there is still some concern around how personal data is used. How have you addressed this?
Always focus on what is your use case and what is the value? Do you want to know what Jackie Jones has been doing in this corner of the building for 25 minutes? Or do you want to know that someone has been there? Do you want to know that five people have occupied this meeting room for a certain period of time, or do you want to know who those five people are? For us it has never been about creating a Big Brother tracking system. That’s not our use case and there is no value in it. It is about choosing the right type of data processing to work out whether our buildings are working the way they should be and whether there are ways of optimising how they are being used and how can that help people achieve their targets on asset use, cost optimisation and health and safety. How can we do that without infringing on people’s privacy? We inform employees about how this data is being used and we are working with our occupiers to help them with this communication element.
If you could give one piece of advice on taking the first step with a smart building strategy, what would it be?
Just do it. Our founder [Coen Van Oostrom] has never been afraid to go beyond what everyone else is doing. This is also in the culture of the Dutch. I am German so I can easily compare my German roots to the Dutch mentality. The Dutch have much more openness to being very innovative. They think “we can probably do this” if we work in the right way and manage the risk in the right way. I think a lot of other cultures want to make sure things are trialled and tested 100%. But spend more time thinking “we can probably do this” than “we probably can’t”.
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