“Open”ing Mindful Building Emotions

Just back from a kaleidoscope of future peeks into “Open”ing Mindful Building Emotions at AHR Expo 2019 in Atlanta.

The Expo drew more than 65,000 attendees, with 1,809 exhibitors total, 496 international exhibitors from 35 countries and 107 first time exhibitors. AutomatedBuildings.com hosted nine sessions all well attended with some overflowing.

So what was at the end of the Open Road Trip to Atlanta?.
 
Lots of excitement and discussion about our changing landscape, much of which was exchanged in our free education sessions.

(We have added pdfs for most of the sessions and links to several resources used in the presentations. )
 
Most of the information was exchanged verbally in the sessions or in the halls after sessions. We were able to capture some of the discussion on video links provided below. But uou really need to be there to get the full impact. Please come next year to Orlando, Feb. 3-5, 2020.

I took some of my own advice looking for more digital native minds to help me extend my best-by date, allowing me to grow younger looking through their future-focused minds. 

This quote is from our last chapter Open Road Trip to Atlanta.

We resist change because we are locked into old ways of thinking. To shift our minds we have to make use of our younger mentors. We need to adopt their understanding of the present digital dynamics. As we meet these young mentors along the road we have to find a way to trust them without the luxury of a common, shared history.

My younger mentors overfilled the room during this self-propelled session, Next Generation HVAC Controls: Open Hardware – Open Software. Our contributing editor Brad White organized the session. His efforts were greeted with a standing room only crowd, which unfortunately made it almost impossible to capture the complete session on video as folks engaged from behind pillars and while sitting on the floor. The room looked like an over-flowing campus lecture hall — a good problem to have.  The discussions were very good and the panel response was amazing, often passionate. But the folks asking the questions could not be picked up on video and we have the sound only.Eric Stromquist, Creator at ControlTrends.com captured the dynamics of this session picking up much of the interactions that contain useful and interesting responses. The industry applauds the efforts and tenacity of Eric and Ken Smyers to document historical events like these:

The "Puppies" and their peers taught me and the other old dogs in the room lots of new tricks. Who knew Raspberries had HATs! (The Raspberry Pi B+ has been designed specifically with add-on boards in mind ‘HATs’ -- Hardware Attached on Top. The session engaged the audience a meaningful interactive discussion about what open was and was not. The panelists did an amazing job of answering these questions and leading thought. So what were the takeaways from this session and others? Stop talking about "Open" and being obsessed with naming everything. Don't talk about it, just do it. Nobody cares what you call it, they just want consistently, constantly, concisely, shareable data available to all anytime/anywhere. Our job is to make this happen with the best tools at hand, whether that is part of an Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Open database, building bots on the edge, or even proprietary sources. This thinking forces existing proprietary folks to think how they will play well with others as they no longer completely control the ball. They need to pass and receive with the bigger players in the game. They are still very important players, but the game has outgrown them, and not realizing this will limit their growth and ability to connect to free services now on everyone's phone.  Yes, everyone's phone. Now the fans get to play in the game. It is a new world for sure. Watching this session come together it convinced me that action was required. We need to hear more from these young voices and I needed to sign up all these younger minds to share their thoughts with you as our newest young contributing editors.  Please meet our Young Contributing Editors. I recommend you look closely at the young folks around you to help you grow younger. Help them to gather their thoughts and share them in a meaningful way with you and the industry at large. Our future depends on it. No young people around you? Now that is a problem in today's rapid digital transformations.

This session, Mindful - Smart Environments for Humans, was to have as its theme unlocking the value and opportunities from time-well-spent digital experiences. My presenting partner  Lawrence Ampofo, PhD  Enterprise Social Media | Humane Technology at Digital Wellbeing wrote me at the last minute,

I'm unable to attend the @ahrexpo today in person, unfortunately, but thankfully my talk is being delivered by @ken_sinclair. Listen to this episode where we distill my talk to its key points

The advantage of this is we have this podcast, Digital Mindfulness Bonus Episode: Building Emotion at the AHR Expo, to share with you and all those that were not there.

I was also very pleased to have these words published in the Show Daily Magazine published by ASHRAE Journal, the magazine printed and made available free to all attendees:

You are at the world’s largest HVACR event, with the most comprehensive gathering of industry professionals from around the globe and we all are engaged in Building Emotion for our products and services in the sense of both the nouns and the verbs. 

Even though our product and services are very real we virtually marketed them; we need to enter today’s virtual world and instill emotion, using vivid graphics and words of want to play on the emotion of our clients. 

"Emotion" is the noun and verb used to describe the creation and depiction of a mindful interactive relationship — a conversation if you will — between the user and their devices and services. It is a virtual identity, a feeling, a learning, an interactive piece, a virtual brick-and-mortar that hosts the emotion.
  
The building blocks of our digital transformation are a mindset, people, process, and tools. Note that tools, which equal our technology, devices, and services is the last item.

We as an industry tend to focus on tools first, then try to trowel over mindset, people, and process. This is not working.

Exploring Our Human Connection: 7th Annual Connection Community Collaboratory created an amazing exchange of information on a wide array of topics. How do we best "Look" with rapidly evolving video analytics, "Listen" with natural language interaction? Use our history of "Feeling" temperature, humidity, occupancies, etc. and best combine this all with 'Thinking" that will come from self-learning?

I was joined by a panel of renown industry experts at our Seventh Annual Connection Community Collaboratory (held January 15th) to assist my efforts to enlighten our industry and help maximize the potential opportunities the burgeoning wave of IoT technologies that both endow — and challenge us.

One of the best ways to obtain a better understanding of what all this IoT technology might mean in the near future and comprehend what is at stake is to assemble of a cast of leading industry experts actively serving as CEO’s, Marketing VP’s, business owners, and Organizational Representatives, and let them hash it out. Marc Petock, Troy Davis, George Thomas, and Martin Villeneuve delivered valuable insights while in engaged in a spirited dialogue about: Present Deployment of Future Technology, Data Generation, Cloud Services, Data Ownership, Cyber Security, Privacy and much more.

Our contributing editor Anto Budiardjo "Facility IT Evangelist" assembled this valuable session to advance BAS cybersercurity, the New Deal Cybersecurity Summit. The Summit was a breakfast meeting to advance BAS cybersecuriity. From its description:

The Summit will bring together industry thought leaders to review the current status of cybersecurity in the BAS industry, discuss the impending release of BACnet/SC and other initiatives, and formulate an appropriate posture for the BAS industry in the security-conscious IT space. The complete summit is provided in a 3-hour video

And more events are coming to open our future mindfully while Building Emotion:

CONTROLS-CON will take place May 2nd and 3rd, 2019 at the MotorCity Casino Hotel in Detroit, Michigan. This fast-paced, education-packed event will bring together hundreds of integrators and end users from throughout the United States and Canada to explore the latest technologies and possibilities of Building Controls and the Internet of Things (IoT) in commercial and industrial buildings.

Haystack Connect 2019is organized and produced by the Project Haystack Organization—an open source community of people and companies who share the vision that a connected, collaborative community can move the industry forward in ways that no single supplier can! The event builds on the inspiration and mission of the community to address the challenges of making smart device data work seamlessly across applications of all types. Also, winter 2019 issue of their Connection magazine is now online.

A lot of links to many evolving resources, YouTubes, and podcast are included in this chapter. Please take the time to follow them as they are all part of the never ending story of our digital transformation