How can we create value together? Buildings exist in every part of the world. And I quite quickly realized that if we could create better buildings faster, it would resonate well across the energy side of things, operations and wasteful ways of working, and of course indoor air quality, well-being and productivity.

Nicolas Waern - Digital Twin Specialist https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolaswaern/ https://twitter.com/BuildWhisperer Contributing Editor

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What interface have 99% (I believe) of ten-year-olds been using for all their life to get things done?

What interface have 99% of the 65-year-olds been using for all their life to get things done?

What interface have 99% of the 105-year-olds been using for all their life to get things done?

The why usually explains the how

The major reason I got into buildings in the first place was that it catered to both two checkboxes I had for what I want to do with my life.

1.      To solve all problems in the world

2.      To have/be a part of, a company operating in all countries in the world.

Buildings exist in every part of the world. And I quite quickly realized that if we could create better buildings faster, it would resonate well across the energy side of things, operations and wasteful ways of working, and of course indoor air quality, well-being and productivity.

“I don’t get that we continue to stare in the rear-view mirror, utilizing the tools of the past. When we need to accelerate into a better future utilizing modern tools to get us out from the very past, we need to get away from. “

The company I started helping got everything in under a BACnet umbrella, so it didn’t matter if you were having IoT sensors in the building, or weather data, or anything else. It was all seen as BACnet devices. This was well before its time I think now in retrospect. They had some of the hurdles though in the sense that they were pure cloud and the UI/UX was similar to what was used in the business, and that the business model, albeit interesting, didn’t make much sense for the existing would be customers in the market.

However, I quickly saw the need for one API to the building. And they had just that in the sense of BACnet/WS.

Where this article from Steve Tom still is an inspiration for me and it is hands down one of the best articles I’ve ever read. Which of course was the inspiration for the topic of this article I co-wrote for the BACnet International journal in 2017

“I don’t know what those BACnet Service are… but I think I want them”. Which is paraphrasing the words from Admiral E.J. King, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations during the second world war when he had said that he didn’t know what the hell this “logistics” are… but he wanted some of it.

Which is the same of how I felt about Digital Twins the last couple of years.

Communication Challenges within the industry, any industry.

Fragmented information. Manual ways of working. Politics. Hierarchy. Not the best solution that wins. Complacency. Skill shortage gap. Lack of interoperability. Where the most obvious two problems are:

1.      People are not communicating with each other across domains.

2.      Systems are not communicating with each other across domains.

And/or.

3.      People are communicating but not understanding each other.

4.      Systems are communicating but not understanding each other.

This in itself is of course just a result of the school system and how its built up. We are forced to think in slices and most people turn out to be domain focused, and possibly domain experts. They know a lot about what they do, but not necessarily a lot of what everyone else is doing. Or, how their idea of reality and the decisions they make, might affect others.  

5.      What happens is that not only is the domain specific knowledge challenging to understand for people outside the domain. The domain specific tools they are using in order to look at the same slice of reality (a building) albeit from different perspectives are very different. The building is there, but the tools they are using to view it are different. And as such, the systems cannot speak with each-other, nor can they understand what they are saying.

Not Enter Sandman, but enter taxonomies and ontologies. And they are of course great at creating a much-needed semantic interoperability between systems in the same/adjacent domain. But still quite challenging to do this across multiple domains across areas. Which is where interlinking is an integral part, knowledge graphs and everything in between. But what about the taxonomy of taxonomies and ontologies for people?

Does that exist? Do those exist? That can bring people of all ages, generations, across space and time on this planet we live on into a shared reality? Can it be that we somehow have missed out on this integral piece of information and we have succumbed to the folly of past generations? Who is the biggest fool really. The fool, or the fool that follows him/her, it?

The Dancing Elephant in the Building

Reality. The world. The interface most people are accustomed to and have been using all of their life is in fact… the world we live in. If you are working within the building realm, it’s… buildings. But it might be a part of that building. The mechanical side, the lighting side, the BMS/BAS side, or the user side or the maintenance, repair, construction, demolition, or anything else for that matter.

But we start at an early age to educate people in abstract ways, slicing the world we have into domains, reading about it in books, and memorising stuff out of context. Why? Well, because back in the day teachers did not have the tools to go to the other side of the world, and visualize what it was like in someone else’s reality. Or directly talk to someone in Sweden so they had to write things down. And make assumptions about it.

But what about now? Well, it just so happens that some of the tools that tackle this problem made it so easy for us to understand what they do that they even have the solution to most fragmented problems in the world today in their name.

Reality.

Virtual Reality. And Augmented Reality.

And Real-time data.

But like any other new technology Virtual Reality as well as Augmented Reality have been met with scepticism, and criticism. Probably from the same people that thought that stones were great to use forever and that smart phones and the internet were just a thing. But if you are in the business of helping people get stuff done better, faster, the easiest approach is to improve the tools you are using to get the job done. It has always been like this. But the fear of the unknown, and the comfort of the known tools of the past are holding us back as a species.

Modern tools in the right order, with the right people

I am using VR/AR/MR and even the Metaverse in everything I do. Utilizing these tools help greatly when leading AI-projects and transferring knowledge across cyberphysical domains. Which is a fancy word for making the point across using reality as a boundary spanning medium acting as a transcription…

The thing is, that I, we, everyone is making it much harder than it needs to be. Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Digital Twins, all these tools can now make it so that people are there in the real world, but from remote. To zoom in to a part of reality, affect that part, with an understanding of its context, and then zoom out again.

Coult all the emails, PDFs, articles, PowerPoints, Excel sheets, and everything that we use away from the very reality we are working in go away?

Buildings, boats, trucks, cars, products, where organizations focus more on processes, hierarchy, culture, systems, and people, instead of content. Where the content in this case, and all other cases are based.

The readers of this article mostly deal with buildings. Yet we have tools not showing a building. It’s showing a graph. And a lot of data is static and predictions and assumptions. Why do we do this when we can have real-time data and simulate what will happen before it happens? I get that this is what we have done in the past. But I don’t get that we continue to stare in the rear-view mirror, utilizing the tools of the past. When we need to accelerate into a better future utilizing modern tools to get us out from the very past, we need to get away from.

And the best tool, except for word and automatedbuildings.com is to show how a decision will affect the reality of a customer. By making a digital replica of their reality, understand what they do, show them what repercussions decisions will have before they make them. And then make the best decision available having seen the result in the virtual world.

And to show this with an interface that a ten-year-old, 65-year-old, and a 105-year-old can understand. This is of course the combination of many interoperable tools used in the right order with also processes that are aligned with culture, hierarchy, people, towards a goal that is easily understood and communicated across any domain.

Could the taxonomy, the ontology, the way of encapsulating data and information across the whole world and to convey meaning on a planetary scale be through the usage of the reality we live in? I believe so. I am currently focusing on creating collaborative change with a Global Digital Twin community that can hopefully create some change for real. If you are interested in knowing creating a better world faster together, let me know!

And of course, Smart Heating System is something that I am very interested in as well. Where we are utilizing Digital Twinning for systems, people, and Artificial Intelligence as much as we can.

How do I know this? Because it’s my job to know what the future will do in a week, a month, a year from now. And if you want to create the future before everyone else? Reach out to me and we’ll make it happen!

How do I know this? Because it’s my job to know what the future will do in a week, a month, a year from now. And if you want to create the future before everyone else? Reach out to me and we’ll make it happen!

Sincerely,

Nicolas Waern
CEO, Founder and Digital Twin Specialist at WINNIIO Consulting

Ceo@winniio.io

Nicolas Waern is the CEO, Strategy & Innovation Leader, and a Digital Twin Implementation Specialist at the consulting firm WINNIIO. He is a firm believer that the Real Estate Industry needs more of a lifecycle focus where we need to go Beyond Buildings and come back with an understanding what tools and technology we could use. And to solve the jobs to be done, together, with an open mindset.

Nicolas is working with leaders in several industries to understand how they can succeed in the age of AI. Predicting what the world will do in a week, a month, a year from now and to best utilize strategies and solutions that pass the test of time. He does this through a Digitalization- on Demand approach for anyone that needs to change before they have to.

Nicolas is also a Podcast Creator & Newsletter Editor for Beyond Buildings
Thought Leader regarding Smart Buildings & Building Automation for AutomatedBuildings
Speaker and Influencer Event Streaming Platforms as the Holy Grail for Industry 4.0 Applications
Subject Matter Expert Real Estate Digitalization Proptech Digitalization Expert
Active Member of Digital Twin working groups Digital Twin Subject Matter Expert