Carlo Ratti's office will allow personalised temperature settings to follow workers around the building.Carlo Ratti is not a fan of the term "smart city."
For the director of MIT's SENSEable City Lab, who was in Sydney, Australia, for the Media Architecture Biennale, the term favours technology over people. In his view, the emphasis should be on using new digital tools that improve quality of life and empower citizens.
"The Internet, which has changed our lives over the past few years, is now entering physical space to become the Internet of things," he told Mashable Australia. "'Smart cities' is simply the application of the Internet of things at the scale of a city."
A new office space created by his design firm, Carlo Ratti Associati, will aim to make a reality of some of those principles. A redesign of the Agnelli Foundation headquarters in Torino, Italy, the building will, according to Ratti, demonstrate how the Internet of things can help make our spaces more sustainable and sociable.
"The main idea is very simple: Today we use a lot of energy to cool empty spaces," he explained. "In the U.S., we use a lot of energy for heating. During the day, there are homes heated when nobody is there."
If energy and occupancy were better synchronised, waste could be eliminated.
In this new office, the digital building management system will automatically alter lighting, heating, air-conditioning and room bookings based on the presence of people, which is communicated via inbuilt sensors. When nobody is present, the Torino building will go on standby, much like your computer.
"Your own personal setting will follow you through the building"
It will also add an important layer of personalisation through so-called "temperature bubbles" that workers will be able to set with a smartphone app that speaks to fan units in the ceiling. "Your own personal [temperature] setting will follow you through the building," he said.
While the project is experimental, Ratti believes it will prove its worth quickly because of the energy and money saved.
For the designer, the project shows that humans need to come first as the Internet and our tangible spaces merge. "I think the main lesson is that you don't want to start with the technology, you want to start with 'what is the idea in terms of usage,' 'what is the idea in terms of what people need,'" he explained.
As with anything digital, security issues must also be considered. If a building's core functions are taken online, what is to stop them being hacked?
Ratti suggested that openness is vital. "I think openness is really one of the key things you want to build in order to increase resilience," he said. "What you don't want to do is have just one computer for the whole building, because then if that computer is somehow hacked, the whole building could be hacked."
Building for resilience will only become more important as the Internet becomes synonymous with the function of our homes, offices and cities. "When you build a 'cyber physical system' — it can be a nuclear power plant — that means if someone hacks the digital side, the cyber side, it would have big consequences on the physical side," he added. "It is something we need to be cautious about."
Ultimately, such resiliency might comes via smart systems that emulate biological systems, where everything has a role to play — think of the white blood cells that rush to your hand if you happen to cut yourself. "The system will involve many different units supervising each other and taking action if something goes wrong," he said.
Technologies that act in concert like the function of the human body may be the answer for truly "smart cities."
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