The Smartest Building in the World

[marmar]

(Bloomberg) It knows where you live. It knows what car you drive. It knows who you’re meeting with today and how much sugar you take in your coffee. (At least it will, after the next software update.) This is the Edge, and it’s quite possibly the smartest office space ever constructed.

A day at the Edge in Amsterdam starts with a smartphone app developed with the building’s main tenant, consulting firm Deloitte. From the minute you wake up, you’re connected. The app checks your schedule, and the building recognizes your car when you arrive and directs you to a parking spot.



Then the app finds you a desk. Because at the Edge, you don’t have one. No one does. Workspaces are based on your schedule: sitting desk, standing desk, work booth, meeting room, balcony seat, or “concentration room.” Wherever you go, the app knows your preferences for light and temperature, and it tweaks the environment accordingly.

The Edge is also the ­greenest building in the world, according to British rating agency BREEAM, which gave it the highest ­sustainability score ever awarded: 98.4 percent. The Dutch have a phrase for all of this: het nieuwe werken, or roughly, the new way of working. It’s about using information technology to shape both the way we work and the spaces in which we do it. It’s about resource efficiency in the traditional sense—the solar panels create more electricity than the building uses—but it’s also about the best use of the humans. ...................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-the-edge-the-worlds-greenest-building/

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Talk about feeling like a cog in the machine ...

sounds like no independent decisions by humans are allowed.

[snooper2]

7. actually it's the opposite...you want to sit in the same cube for 15 years

or have your environment you need change as you change...

wonder which IP phone they are using for hot desking

[eppur_se_muova]

9. I'd like to set my stuff down and know it will be there when I get back ...

... rather than be worried about whether there will be there when I get back. There's something to be said for personal space.

[Taitertots]

2. I, for one, welcome our new building overlords

[NV Whino]

3. Sounds good to me

I wonder if it would provide that padded log, lofty redwoods and forest murmurs for my work environment?

[malthaussen]

4. "I have seen the future, and it works."

"And I don't want to live there." -- The excluded part of Lincoln Steffens's quote.

-- Mal

[JHB]

5. It's telling that my thoughts immediately spring to...

Last edited Sat Sep 26, 2015, 12:23 PM - Edit history (1)

...how to use the system to harass people: either from on high (constant last-minute location rescheduling, forcing someone to waste time walking back & forth across the building) to the retail end (spills and crumbs that will get blamed on whoever just vacated the seat). Not the mention the havoc a ninja dongle-switcher could wreak...

Then there's the unintentional annoyances: having to re-adjust your seat settings every single time you move to a new spot because whoever was there before has them to high or too low, the back is too stiff or swings back so easy you nearly fall over, etc.

No personalization, of course, except for what you lug around with you.

Not likely I'd be happy working there, which is ironic, because my office has those "meeting couches", just in a better color than that neon green.

[COLGATE4]

6. The office building from hell. nt

[Glassunion]

8. Technology is scary for some.

I like it.

I've been sitting in the same desk for 7 years. I have a boss who can not schedule anything to save his life. I try to plan out my day... You know, so I can be productive. To have a building that can identify you're working for a micromanager, and is wasting your time would be a welcome vacation from the norm.