Disrupting Disruption

My mind is a kaleidoscope of future peeks into our Disruptions previewed @AHREXPO 2019 Atlanta.

This online interview ControlTalk NOW — Smart Buildings Videocast and PodCast for the week ending Feb 3, 2019, features me, Ken Sinclair, who helps to navigate our journey through the perilous “Path of Least Disruption,” 

I am always looking for the easiest way to explain what is going on. This simple diagram shows where our focus was, but now where it needs to be.

Last year we saw innovation and our entry into doing new things. We were growing, finally.  This year the talk of disruption was everywhere. As an industry that will survive we need to be Doing Disruption not just watching and waiting to be Disrupted.

What are some examples of disruptions coming to our Automated Building Industry?

Imagine a building in the middle of a blackout and a car driving up with a V2G battery ready to charge the whole building within hours?   That is a disruption reaching smart buildings very soon.  EVs helping utilities with demand response is now creating such a disruption in smart buildings.

Demand response programs are also becoming more prevalent, and more complex. As an example, Southern California Edison’s

Critical Peak Pricing demand response program imposes an extremely high surcharge from 2 to 6 PM twelve times a year on the highest system use days. In SCE’s TOU-GS-3 schedule, the additional charge per kWh is $1.37453 for all consumption during the Critical Peak event.

Resulting in The Tariff Engine. Once the “charges” that make up a tariff rate are defined, the next step is to assign the tariff to the meters that measure energy use. The Tariff Engine then calculates energy costs based on the charges and actual energy consumption data. Analytics rules and algorithms can then use those detailed cost calculations to calculate the cost associated with issues it detects in the operation of equipment systems. The result is a precise calculation of costs associated with the use, and misuse, of energy resources.

Advice is to keep your eyes and ears open for impending disruption in BAS.  There are three kinds of people when it comes to change: those who resist it, those who accept it, and those who make it happen. In this brief article, I’ll share my views on how these different types of people should look at disruption.

How to improve communication between people and smart buildings. USC researchers found people connect better with a computer-generated avatar that represents building management — and small talk helped, too

But yet!

Why Are Big Buildings So Dumb?  Most big buildings I walk into are currently dumb.  They leave the lights on all the time, they don’t care who I am or what I am doing there, and they don’t change the temperature until it becomes uncomfortable and I complain.  So why do we call them smart buildings when they are so stupid?

We are definitely in the days of disruption, for a future peek at coming disruption take a look at this Videocast and PodCast with author and Future Technologist, Sudha Jamthe, from Silicon Valley, who explains business model creation along the yellow-bricked-digital-transformational-highway.  Sudha Jamthe is the CEO of IoTDisruptions.com and a globally recognized Technology Futurist with 20+ year mix of entrepreneurial, academic and operational growth experience from eBay, PayPal, GTE, and Harcourt. She is the author of “2030 The Driverless World: Business Transformation from Autonomous Vehicles” and 3 other IoT books (all available on Amazon), teacher of IoT and Autonomous Vehicles business courses at Stanford Continuing Studies and at DriverlessWorldSchool.com. Sudha enjoys shaping new technology ecosystems and mentoring leaders on digital transformation. She chairs the strategic advisory council of Barcelona Technology School and an Ambassador for FundingBox Impact Connected Cars (H2020) Community. She has an MBA from Boston University.

This is a fun peek from the past into our future disruptions done Monday, November 07, 2016, am done talking to people about intelligent machines.

Starting today I am going to interview intelligent machines directly.

The buzz of AHRExpo never completely happens just on the exhibit floor or at the education sessions but in the moments between in the minds of never before networked folks in the huddles in booths, halls, buses, Uber, Lyft, taxis, bars, and hotel rooms. Meaningful discussions of "Doing Disruption" before we are Disrupted.

Disruption is everywhere yet at our core we still use pneumatics, Ethernet, BACnet, Niagara Framework. We are at a disruption point that is equal to what DDC did to pneumatics, What internet did to DDC.  IoT is disrupting us. Disruption is making things that make the old things obsolete. Except our "things" buildings cannot be made obsolete completely, at least not yet, so we need to build elegant mindful bridges between disruption, innovation, and reality.   As scary as this thought is this is just the dawn of what we will see in the following days of disruptions.

This last chapter captures some of the disruptions from the @AHRExpo event and my ramblings that are dawning on our new digital transformation horizon.

“Open”ing Mindful Building Emotions. It links to amazing resources in powerpoints, youtube, podcasts and URLs.

How did we get on the road to disruption? This review provides further insight.

The Open Road Is Bumpy, Edgy, but Mindful

Notes from the 7th Annual Connection Community Collaboratory - An all-star lineup from the building automation community gathers at AHR Expo to share what interests and excites them this year. Steve Spaulding, Jan 24, 2019

While doing disruption because we are changing everything we have an amazing opportunity to create well spent digital experiences. Building Emotion a term that I have coined is a whimsical social fabric that is draped on and is part of every building Unlocking value and opportunities from time well spent digital experiences

My younger mentors self-propelled session overfilled the room (Video capture here) opening everything, mostly our minds in this session, Next Generation HVAC Controls: Open Hardware – Open Software

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Staring into the kaleidoscope of disruption at this event convinced me that action was required, we need to hear more from these young voices who are doing disruption, and I needed to sign up all these younger minds and share their thoughts with you as our newest young contributing editors.

With the capture from @AHRExpo and my young guns contributing editors sharing their thoughts, we will start the dawn of disruption.

Please meet our Young Contributing Editors.

To help you grow younger, I recommend that you look closely at the young folks around you.  Help them to gather their thoughts and share them in a meaningful way with you and the industry at large. Our future depends on it 

I shared this question in this tweet;

How do we address our industry gender imbalance as we humanize the digitalization of our industry while mindfully building emotion? This imbalance is a great opportunity to involve new minds that well understand emotion and user experience UX.

No young people around you?  Now that is a problem in today's rapid digital transformations.

My presenting partner Lawrence Ampofo, Ph.D.  Enterprise Social Media | Humane Technology | Digital Wellbeing wrote this,

I'm unable to attend the @ahrexpo today in person, unfortunately, but thankfully my talk is being delivered by @ken_sinclair. Listen to this episode where we distill my talk to its key points.

In this podcast which I wish to share with you, a building automation technologist for over 50 years "That is me" attempts to explain building emotion.  I hope my desire and excitement about including digital mindfulness as part of our disruption is heard.  I admit it is a leap, but if you roll back your eyes and imagine what you think digital mindfulness might mean and how we could use it as a tool building emotion while doing disruption, think you can imagine a better outcome.

Digital Mindfulness Bonus Episode: Building Emotion at the AHR Expo

This website defines better the components of Building Emotion and is a very good resource for our journey to Socially Acceptable Autonomous Buildings.  The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems) is launching the second version of Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, (EADv2) the most comprehensive, crowd-sourced global treatise regarding the Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems available today.

The Enhanced Occupant Experience – Taking Buildings to the Next Level!  Howard Berger, Managing Partner, Program Director, Realcomm explains the workspace our holy grail of achievement is also in the state of disruption.

The earliest efforts to give occupants control fed into data streams about their usage and needs. Many of these applications tie into location and traffic analysis, people counting and people analytics. It includes information about their work habits, preferences and behaviors. While some see this data as a potential revenue stream, there must be a strong privacy policy around the data: how it can and can't be used. Some sensors may be getting into gray areas as far as what is personal or not. If you can analyze or predict the mood of the room, how will that tie into the ways we control for 'happiness'? As AI and Machine Learning become more predictive, there is great potential to be incredibly helpful, but also potentially invasive.

In essence, the way a building interacts with you in an inspiring, engaging way creates a feeling of ease, kinship and belonging. Responsiveness and anticipation of needs will be a given. Valuable time is freed up from mundane tasks like monitoring and managing meeting room bookings, and instead used to creatively engage with peers and for strategy planning for the business. The physical building or campus becomes the immersive digital workplace, a healthier, more profitable place for the humans who work there.

The fundamentals on digital transformation and evolution, including workplace experience, and other industry top of mind topics, will be discussed at Realcomm | IBcon 2019. The conferences will be held in Nashville, TN on June 13 & 14.

And more events are coming to open our future mindfully while Building Emotion creating our discussion of our disruptions

CONTROLS-CON will take place May 2nd and 3rd, 2019 at the MotorCity Casino Hotel in Detroit, Michigan. This fast-paced, education-packed event will bring together hundreds of integrators and end users from throughout the United States and Canada to explore the latest technologies and possibilities of Building Controls and the Internet of Things (IoT) in commercial and industrial buildings.

Haystack Connect 2019 is organized and produced by the Project Haystack Organization—an open source community of people and companies who share the vision that a connected, collaborative community can move the industry forward in ways that no single supplier can! The event builds on the inspiration and mission of the community to address the challenges of making smart device data work seamlessly across applications of all types.

Building emotions in our Days of Disruptions have just begun and daily disruption will become the norm and those that will exceed will disrupt the disruption.