The essential building blocks of a community are buildings. Like the larger community, buildings have to accommodate all the needs of a diverse group of people. Some "smart" systems are employed in the built environment, but they are designed to facilitate operations and improve efficiency. Do these systems benefit the inhabitants of the whole community, especially marginalized groups who often do not have a say in shaping policy and practices related to building management? In a democratic society, connected communities must be safe, comfortable, healthy, easy to use, and support productivity, contributing to the advancement of a just society for all. To meet these needs, a truly smart system should be cybernetic: it can incorporate feedback for self-regulation toward desirable goals. This research will develop and test an integrated platform to collect feedback on building performance, communicate that information to all building users, and create an online community through which members can influence the operation of building services and facilities. A proactive intelligent, or cybernetic system that engages the community of building users will provide the data to evaluate connected community strategies from a social perspective.
The system will leverage smart phones and commercial augmented reality equipment to develop an inexpensive system of feedback and control that could be implemented in any building. It will include a sensor array for innovative building performance measurement, a set of dashboards for communicating and controlling the status of systems, and automated participatory processes that assess and communicate outcomes like satisfaction, comfort, and social engagement to facilities managers. The system will combine technologies from sensing, artificial intelligence, psychophysical research and social media. Implementing such systems on a large scale will provide data to create benchmarks for performance, identify unknown health threats, and understand the design features that contribute to productivity, satisfaction and community building. Once a working system has been implemented successfully for buildings, it can be scaled up for community wide use.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
