What has 50 years in the industry taught me? That adaptation is our survival superpower.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Tony Bennett who said, “The more I learn the less I know.” The fountain of knowledge feeds an ocean of answers that are served by the droplet and limited by our mortal lifespan. Every time you learn something new it creates more questions in your head than the answers you have just assimilated.
The adaptation process is a critical part of cognitive development. Through the processes of assimilation and accommodation, people are able to take in new information, form new ideas or change existing ones, and adopt new behaviors that make them better prepared to deal with the world around them.
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intelligent of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives, but the species that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
This may best describe my last 50 years. I can’t lay claim to be the most intellectual or the strongest guy around, but I’ve certainly tried to be one of the most adaptable. Growing up as a very small younger brother and with my all friends (and not-friends) who were all huge, I learned to be extremely aware of my environment. Agility, with the ability to go around unmovable objects, quickly proved to be a good life skill.
Now my old head hurts. My personnel evolution of change has been overwhelming. We all need to change but we are drowning in information, so much to learn dynamically changing daily in ever-expanding amounts—entire new realms of science and technology that include complete other industries.
Lately, I have been writing on such topics as Be the Change and Chose to Challenge. We then followed up with the March issue and Our Amazing Women Choose to Challenge (which fits well because that title is from the International Women's Day 2021 campaign theme).
Scott Cochrane, President, and CEO, Cochrane Supply & Engineering talks about industry change and adaptation in this article, The End of the BAS Era. From his opening:
THE FIRST ERA OF BUILDING AUTOMATION | THE PNEUMATIC ERA (1900s to 1980)
This era started in the early 1900s with stand-alone pneumatic controls / air pressure-driven devices. These devices were continually improved into the 1960s when the receiver controller, pneumatic sensors and other innovations allowed for AHU and centralized control in large buildings for the first time. This led to great growth for the industry in the 1970s because they could finally offer better comfort control more efficiently. All good things come to an end and so did the PNEUMATIC ERA, when the microchip became available to the industry in the early 1980s. The microchips brought computers, and with computers came a new era in BAS...
Allow me a brief interruption.
When I started in this industry in the 1960s I found my way to the service department of Johnson Control. I was introduced to pneumatic systems still in operation dating back in the early 1900 and had to work with clients to find survival solutions. Later I had to get my head around the evolution of central panel pneumatic transmission in the large buildings, understand the first fluidic logic, pneumatic systems performing analog or digital operations similar to those performed with electronics (the first Air Computers).
After that came the transition to hard-wired logic systems, then transition to electronic controls (a very bumpy process), central computers connected to pneumatics. Then I shifted to being a consultant (because no one knew what else to call me). I was very early to the Direct Digital Control (DDC) industry in 1975 using the DEC PDP11 mini computer and the first DDC stand-alone computerized panels.
We made most of our own sensors because what we needed had not been invented yet (or were too expensive). Learning and adapting had become a way of life. It just became my way of coping and moving on.
Scott’s complete article ends with:
THE OPERATIONAL TECHNOLOGY (OT) ERA (2020 to hopefully I’ll be retired????) - Here we go, into the great IT black hole—a whole new vocabulary and a new way of architecting our BAS solutions. No longer will we be worried about what kind of protocol the systems has, but instead whether the IP device has an API or a web server. The OT era will allow us to cost-effectively connect different building control applications together on a dedicated network on premise and allow for the systems to work together to accomplish new applications in occupant and owner experiences.
YES, the BAS industry is becoming another IT industry, just like the telephone industry did.
Instead of dedicating a business's IT department to dealing with networks that support the building, these new networks will be designed by mechanical engineers, installed by mechanical contractors, and maintained by the building’s facility staff, all of whom will combine their mechanical knowledge with new IT knowledge to craft a modern solution. Welcome to our new reality—completely IP based digitized systems controlling buildings with 100X the data. That data, constantly being analyzed by analytics driven by artificial intelligence, are creating new energy efficiency standards, new building control capabilities, and an entire industry of new smart building features now enabled for the owners and occupants within.
To help our adaptation we need to be Born Again Connected. Perception of reality is everything. We need a method to disconnect from our perceptions.
In this next discussion, I am whispering with Sweden, because information is now instant, global, anywhere and anytime. Which means you can drown in the information or get out of your head and adapt.
This piece, Building Automation and AI?, is a discussion between myself and Nicolas “The Building Whisperer” Waern:
Ken S.: Hi Nicolas, how are things going on? I see that you are really pushing the boundaries of automated buildings, and talking about 3D printing, energy, railways, national digital twins, and other things. Are you leaving the fold?
Nicolas W.: It’s more that I have felt a need to “go beyond buildings for real, to come back to the real-estate industry armed with the knowledge that we need to have”, like I said at the beginning of the year. I think that’s the only way to learn, and to understand what others are doing in the industrial space, or even healthcare. Hospitals for instance are a part of healthcare too, so that space is very interesting from a Building Automation, indoor Air Quality perspective…
Ken S.: Okay, so maybe instead of Location, Location Location, you are saying that it’s more about Context, Context Context? Fascinating. But is there any method to the madness?
Nicolas W.: Any method to the madness? Well, yes and no. I don’t save any energy for the swim back to shore, so I’m constantly out there in the deep waters. But most recently I’ve taken the lead for interoperable Digital Twins in Manufacturing, as well as the European lead for the Infrastructure Working group at the Digital Twin Consortium. So, if there are people in Europe (or elsewhere) and want to know more about what the concept of Digital Twins can do for infrastructure, just reach out to me and join a session as a guest!
Ken S.: Digital Twins is definitely the new hype. I see it everywhere these days and I heard that some people even say that all buildings will have a digital twin in the future. Do you agree?
Nicolas W.: I really don’t agree with that statement at all. Buildings will definitely not have a digital twin in the future. They will have hundreds of Digital Twins in the future! The OEMs will have digital twins of their products and there will be digital twins of complete assets, part of assets, and individual components of the HVAC realm as a whole. The buildings themselves need to be part of the Smart Grid Digtial Twin and the Smart City Digital Twin which both consists of hundreds if not thousands of Digital Twins. And the owners will probably have a Digital Twin with data built from other interoperable Digital Twins. Knowing this, and also the challenges that exists already with data-integration puts even more emphasis on the importance of interoperable Digital Twins, and semantic interoperability as a whole.
There is even more of Nicolas here at the Beyond Buildings Podcast. Their latest tackles the thorny problem of how we are adapting not only ourselves, but the world around us:
World made for Humans? Or Machines? Simplifying the Complexity of IoT
We are probably going to rely on machines and AI to become trusted advisors for humans to take better take better decisions through blockchain capabilities…
Sometimes these mixed-media global conversations threaten to drowned us in big thoughts. When that happens we need to be abel to disconnect from our learned perceptions.
Thoughts are now communicated on social media globally like this post from James Dice, the founder of Nexus Labs, on the company’s new Foundations course. Here are just some of the technologies represented:
Analytics software, Smart valves, Digital twin software, Hybrid overlay software, Advanced supervisory control, HVAC hardware, Chilled water plant optimization, Smart building rating system, Audio/visual, Base building networks, and many more.
As our mediums of communication evolve the reach of our voice moves from local, to national, to global—from workspace to everywhere. We need to be the change, disconnecting from our learned perceptions and hone our adaptation superpowers. Bob Dylan was right, the times they are a changing:
Come, gather round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
Then you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone
For the times, they are a changing