Rather than take the usual approach, starting from a central point and delivering services across a wide area (the office space), let’s start at the point of use of the services, the individual user at the individual desktop. The categories of products and devices here include: lighting (task and ambient light sources); ventilation and cooling (personal fans and filters); heating (personal heating devices); and to control these and optimize energy use, sensors, software and control systems.
What would the general requirements be for individual components and for integrated systems? First, all should be significantly more energy efficient than the standard configuration in today’s office. There’s plenty of room for improvement here, since the norm is overbuilt, oversized, inefficient, highly wasteful systems and components. But using the “tunneling through the cost barrier” approach, we should target energy efficiency that is on the level of 80% better than standard practice. Next, embedded energy and product life cycles need to be optimized, using biomimetic and cradle-to-cradle approaches. The industrial processes for manufacturing most office products (and most building products for that matter), are very energy intensive and fossil fuel intensive and materials like plastics and metals predominate. New materials are emerging that can be effective replacements.
Product maintenance, cleaning, and replacement cycles must be optimized. Components that require frequent replacement, updating, or adjusting carry costs that are often invisible to buyers when these components are originally specified. Components and systems should also be easy to install and access: plug-and-play, interoperability, and maximum flexibility in configuration should be key design parameters. Related to this, components and systems should be as small as possible, as the scale effects of smaller components can lead to smaller desktops and a more efficient use of the floorplate in offices, as well as energy efficiency.
Optimal user interface is one of the top requirements for the green desktop: devices and systems should be easy to use and offer a rich variety of options without confusing us with too many choices. It’s tempting to extend the iPhone user interface across all product categories that require any user interface, and indeed many building control systems are operable from your phone today. Studies by institutions like the Center for the Built Environment and LBNL show that improved individual control of building system components, like operable windows and zone control for HVAC usually results in higher occupant satisfaction and comfort as well as improved energy efficiency.
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So what would all of this look and feel like? Let’s start with lighting, which in one way is one of the most overlooked and least understood of the various building systems. Deep green designers practicing fully integrated design have known for years that optimal lighting is a crucial component to high performing buildings. Decentralizing and downsizing lighting has many different strategies, including daylight harvesting, reducing excessive overhead ambient lighting, and improving low energy, high output task lighting. Single source LEDs can now be used for task lighting that are dramatically smaller and more energy efficient and produce much higher quality light than previous generations of task light products. What if the office task light drew only 1 watt, illuminated the entire desktop, was made largely of a nanotech material consisting of crystals grown at room temperature, had a miniature smart occupancy sensor that turned the lamp on and drew power only when needed, had perfect color temperature, was exquisitely controllable and dimmable, took up only 16 square inches of desk space, needed replacement bulbs only once every 5 years, and cost under $75? (You’d probably also want it to make breakfast and coffee for you every day, along with a five o’clock martini and plane reservations for your next trip to Davos.) The task light should be designed to be part of the building lighting system, including ambient and daylighting, and would connect to the control system through a wireless sensor.
Centralized HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) systems in commercial office buildings are routinely overbuilt and waste massive amounts of energy. Supplementing these services with devices at the desktop will reduce energy use and the cost of installing and maintaining HVAC systems, as well as enabling downsizing or elimination of many kinds of systems. Smaller more efficient personal devices for heating, cooling, filtration, and ventilation can have a positive impact on energy use and comfort when designed as part of a system, following the parameters described for the task light above: downsized, hyper efficient, beautiful and elegant, made with low embedded energy materials (in USA!), smart and interconnected.
In a typical green project (either retrofit or new construction) engineers and architects ideally optimize building systems like HVAC, lighting, facades, even structural. But until recently they haven’t looked at building energy use by non-system equipment like copiers, computers, and other kinds of gear. When plug-load studies are undertaken by the design team as part of a whole system design approach, (especially in equipment intensive building types like labs and other critical facilities) significant energy savings are frequently discovered. Working with OEMs to right-size power supplies, reduce heat output, and eliminate phantom loads can yield important energy savings that can reduce the need for building systems.
One final requirement of the design brief: components and systems should be affordable and practical. I were designing it, I’d get to the lowest cost solution first, as this would allow it to scale faster. If the integrated suite of small personal building system devices was taken seriously enough by a large office furniture company or other OEM, it could potentially revolutionize the way the company did business, as Interface Carpeting did under Ray Anderson. While the best path to an optimal solution lies in excellent design, the exploration of new materials alone represents enough uncharted territory to engage an entire industry.
An important effect of a super efficient suite of personal products will be that by embodying energy efficiency and improved services in the same set of products, awareness of daily personal energy use will be brought to the workforce literally in their faces, on their desktops, and this can help to drive behavioral change around energy use at home and elsewhere. Smart OEMS will recognize these product opportunities, engage designers and engineers in building and marketing a new generation of distributed devices that will revolutionize the workplace.
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