What happens when our buildings start to think for themselves?
This is not science fiction; this is the next generation of the built environment.
POSSIBILITIES
What if our buildings could speak, think, or even dream? How might they behave and enrich the lives of their occupants? Exploring these questions can help us discover paths leading from our current understanding of digital twins and AI to a future where our buildings express sentient behaviours.
In popular culture, sentient buildings are portrayed in formats as diverse as Doctor Who’s time-travelling TARDIS to Howl’s Moving Castle. However, when we look to the future potential of the built environment, it’s essential to explore how buildings can use technology to sustainably support and elevate the lives of those within.
While technology such as smartphones or smart home devices have been successfully integrated into our everyday lives, using these in a more open-ended space—like the built environment—remains largely unexplored. This is likely because so many interactions, activities, and relationships occur within buildings, along with their interdependencies. How can we prepare for a future where sentient buildings become second nature in the design of our built environment?
This evolving world introduces a new lexicon to demystify a future where technology understands a broad range of human actions and characteristics.
Sentient buildings play a key role in this shift by integrating a whole-system perspective, prioritising building life cycles, and valuing reuse and performance-led solutions.
What are Digital Twins?
As the concept evolves, there are many definitions of digital twins across various domains. At its core, a digital twin is a virtual model that represents a real-world object or system, mirroring its state, processes, and behaviour. Digital twins in the built environment vary in scale and complexity, ranging from basic representations to highly detailed data models. Integrating digital twins into our physical world creates an intuitive interface connecting humans and buildings, reflecting natural human behaviours and interactions that people are accustomed to in their daily lives.
What is a sentient building?
Human cognition has three main components that can be integrated into building systems: perception, action, and learning. Sentient buildings are defined as those with an advanced understanding of their environment, components, and processes, which can update their knowledge in real time. These buildings aim to achieve a form of artificial awareness, allowing them to perceive, interpret, and anticipate the needs and preferences of occupants in more intelligent ways.
What might a sentient building be able to do?
The intersection of digital building management with intelligent HVAC systems, smart lighting, geo-positioning-based navigation, space optimisation, energy management, and occupant safety can create exciting new possibilities. By extending this approach to create a framework that draws insights from community resources, it can lead to empowerment and two-way interactions between buildings and their occupants. In the future, buildings will engage in an expansive cycle: a building learns from a community, empowers that community, and then learns again from what the community achieves. Keep on reading to see what a day in the life of the user of a sentient building may look like five years from now…
Key behaviours of sentient buildings may include:
AI-driven, but who is driving?
Data-driven or AI-driven approaches are not panaceas. The presence of a pattern in data doesn’t automatically make it meaningful or easy to interpret. For many unresolved problems at the intersection of the built environment and technology, the limiting factor is often the quality or availability of data. It requires deep thinking about the design space we aim to enable and how to gather the necessary signals from the data. The goal is for designers to no longer to plan every possible behaviour they want a building system to understand. As enablers of these environments, it is important to consider the range of behaviours that should be captured in the models being created. This space represents the power of sentient buildings and their potential to enable new and useful interactions.
Although true sentience in buildings may remain a distant goal, we are conceptually moving toward this vision by evolving frameworks across multiple areas simultaneously, such as technological foundations, spatial integration, decision-making, autonomy, levels of agency, ethics, privacy, and cultural influences or personality-like traits.
What can we do now to enable a sentient building future?
Building toward a future where buildings intelligently anticipate and meet individual and community needs is a long-term goal, but there are steps that can be taken in the short term. Adopting a phased approach lays the groundwork for sentient buildings in the future.
Evidence-based solutions. The first step is the widespread adoption of evidence-based solutions, relying on real-world data from sensors, energy systems, and occupant behaviour. This data informs future design decisions, ensuring new buildings are more efficient and adaptive from the outset. In the short term, retrofitting existing buildings with predictive technologies enables them to adjust to patterns and trends before they occur.
Adaptive buildings. Adaptive systems can be achieved using AI, where buildings automatically adjust systems like heating, cooling, lighting, and ventilation to meet occupants’ immediate needs. Implementing AI-driven control systems allows buildings to behave more intelligently, making decisions based on users’ habits and preferences without constant manual input. This shift toward adaptability in building systems is a key step forward.
Human and nature-centred solutions. As AI becomes integrated into buildings, it’s crucial that it remains human-centred. Sentient buildings should embrace inputs beyond personal agency, fostering a more inclusive representation of values. This approach extends to considering nature as an equal partner in decision-making, treating multiple species as stakeholders.
Energy efficiency. While sentient buildings equipped with sophisticated physical AI systems promise improved energy efficiency, the technologies enabling these efficiencies also require significant energy to operate. Establishing standardised energy transparency metrics for AI technologies is vital. These metrics empower designers, engineers, contractors, and operators to optimise energy consumption throughout a building’s lifecycle.
Enriching environments
The expansion and refinement of the sentient buildings concept will create environments that truly enrich human interactions and contribute positively to community well-being. The focus of building design is shifting from individual benefit to collective communities and multi-species stakeholders. This transition emphasises contribution, restoration, and regeneration to improve well-being, safety, and resilience. Sentient buildings play a key role in this shift by integrating a whole-system perspective, prioritising building life cycles, and valuing reuse and performance-led solutions. These buildings will interact intuitively with users, creating environments that respond dynamically to diverse needs.
LET'S TALK
Learn more about our ongoing research into sentient buildings. Eirini Tsouknida, Principal Research Consultant
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Exploring future frameworks.
Impact on human experience.
BENEFIT
Personalised work environment – A sentient building offers a highly personalised work environment, adjusting lighting, temperature, and noise levels to suit individual preferences. This personalisation can lead to increased productivity and well-being.
BENEFIT
Nature-inspired design – Incorporating biophilic design principles, which aim to connect occupants more closely to nature, sentient buildings can enhance well-being and reduce stress. Features like natural lighting, green spaces, and water elements can create a more harmonious and healthful environment.
RISK
Potential for overreliance – On the contrary, people could be less adept at adjusting to environments that are not optimised or automated. This could reduce their ability to adapt to new or challenging situations where environmental control is not as refined or personalised.
RISK
Decision-making – Relying on automated systems for environmental adjustments and task management could lead to a decreased reliance on personal judgment and decision-making skills. When technology makes decisions based on data and algorithms, individuals might defer to these automated choices even in situations where personal judgment could be more appropriate.
Impact on communities.
BENEFIT
Inclusive spaces – Sentient buildings, through their adaptive nature, can cater to a diverse range of needs and preferences, making public and communal spaces more inclusive. They can adjust lighting, sound, and layout in real-time to accommodate different events, gatherings, or individual requirements, ensuring that spaces are accessible and welcoming to everyone. This adaptability breaks down barriers to participation, encouraging a broader cross-section of the community to engage in public life and communal activities.
RISK
Human interaction – Maintaining a balance where technology enhances rather than replaces human interaction is essential. Despite the building’s ability to facilitate communication, the value of face-to-face interaction and the human element in collaboration cannot be overstated.
AI lacks the human touch to create an authentic connection. While AI offers numerous advantages, it is important not to overlook the value of human interaction in building and maintaining thriving community engagement. Some key aspects that AI cannot fully replicate include: emotional intelligence, body language, active listening, building rapport and adaptability.
Ethics & privacy.
RISK
Privacy concerns – The extensive data collection necessary for a sentient building’s operations raises significant privacy issues. Managing this data responsibly and transparently is crucial to maintaining trust.
RISK
Algorithmic bias – Decisions made by the building, from environmental controls to space allocation, must be scrutinised for potential biases. Ensuring fairness and equity in these decisions is a complex ethical challenge.
RISK
Transparency and consent – Occupants may not always be aware of the extent of data collection or how their information is being used.
OPPORTUNITY
Ensuring data privacy, security, transparency, and fairness are key challenges that must be addressed to maintain trust and equity in the use of these advanced technologies.
OPPORTUNITY
Human values into sentient buildings – The inherent non-neutrality of AI algorithms is an incontrovertible aspect of their design and implementation: these algorithms, by their nature, embody certain values. This is due to their training methodologies, which may explicitly or implicitly instil notions of what constitutes “desirable” behaviours.
Values, understood as beliefs pertaining to desirable end states, emerge from fundamental human needs and are expressed variably across different cultural contexts. Thus, those algorithms, as deliberately designed entities, mirror and propagate the values of their creators.
OPPORTUNITY
Current inputs to AI algorithms – ranging from engagement metrics and surveys to assessments of well-being—emphasise individualistic values. These inputs foreground personal agency, individual enjoyment, and stimulation, privileging a singular dimension of human experience.
To cultivate a more inclusive representation of values within our buildings, it is important to directly incorporate models that capture a broader spectrum of values, thereby acknowledging and addressing the multifaceted nature of human values and needs.
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