Can smart buildings offer sustainability without sacrificing privacy?

Spark53:59Smart, sustainable buildings

From circadian lighting and automatic blinds to smart sensors monitoring for extreme weather events — smart building technology has the capacity to shape our day-to-day lives. 

While smart technology can serve a myriad of purposes across diverse built environments, engineer Jenn McArthur says sustainability is "the most valuable goal."

"Buildings have been identified as one of the most promising areas to actually decarbonize," McArthur, an associate professor of architectural science at Toronto Metropolitan University, told Spark host Nora Young. 

"Studies showing 30 to 40 per cent reductions in greenhouse gases — without new equipment, this is just with new changes to controls — is really promising. And I think that's where the smart buildings market is really seeing that smart and sustainable is a lot more useful."

Beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions, McArthur says smart building designs can also monitor for extreme weather events. 

"Things like automatic monitoring of floods, automatic monitoring of vibrations," she said. 

"So they actually use it in things like infrastructure, you can put smart sensors within building bridges and actually determine earthquakes, determine whether there's a likelihood of failure so you can proactively shut them off. 

The public spaces we use and the buildings we work in aren't the only places adopting smart technology — we may soon see more automation in our homes too. 

The intimacy of the Internet of Things 

The rollout of Matter — a new standard for the Internet of Things (IoT) industry — has sparked a lot of conversation about the future of smart homes. With Matter, IoT devices will be able to more easily connect to each other, regardless of who made them.

"Now what you're going to have with Matter, is this lightbulb will speak a universal language, basically," said Stacey Higginbotham, a technology journalist and the creator of The Internet of Things Podcast. 

"It will tell all of these platforms that have their own language, 'I'm a lightbulb. I can turn on, turn off. I can do these colours. I can dim.' And any of those will be able to understand it without having a separate app, without having to do constant integration work."

The road to a seamless Iot consumer experience came to a peak for Higginbotham when Matter was joined by another new key player in the industry called Amazon Sidewalk. 

"The sidewalk network is a free way for companies to send small amounts of data over this great wide area," she said. 

"There's a lot of potential in having something that's inexpensive [to] share data."

While networked, smart homes offer newfound convenience in some respects, privacy is still a chief issue. 

"I would like to see governments focus on privacy to the extent that they have focused on cybersecurity," said Higginbotham. 

"I know it doesn't seem like it, but we have done some really good work around cybersecurity and locking this stuff down. I would like us to do the same with regards to privacy at a federal level."

Free will in a smart world

Patrick Lecomte, a professor of real estate at Université du Québec à Montréal, has a more philosophical concern about the expansion of smart buildings and their impact on human rights. 

In December 2022, Lecomte wrote in The Conversation that his main concern about smart building technology is spatial appropriation. 

"Little by little, basically, what those tech companies have been doing is integrating physical space into their own operations in digital space," he told Young. 

"This process of spatial appropriation is reaching possibly an ultimate stage, when digital space suddenly will merge with physical space. And this is exactly what we have, in the context of, potentially, smart buildings. 

"Smart buildings will be the first spaces where this will be implemented on a large scale, because they are designed for it in a way."

Lecomte says while smart technology can offer users a positive utility experience, it comes at a cost. 

"The issue is really, you are losing your ability to have freedom over the way you interact with space," he said. 

To combat this loss of agency, Lecomte would like to see new smart space regulations. 

"I believe that as we have property rights in physical space, we need to have what I call digital rights in those new smart spaces — i.e., we need to give users of those spaces the ability to choose.

"[That] even users who are willing to give up their freedom, literally freewill, in order to benefit from those technologies, are properly informed and fully aware of what's happening."