What Smart Building Designers can Learn from the 10 Year Old iPhone

Ten years after the release of the first iPhone, I wanted to share how the smartphone has influenced my design approach to smart buildings. Early in my career my mentor, Joe Wetternach, taught me the conventional wisdom that it's preferable to do one thing and do it well. This was valid advice at a time when we lived in a modular world of devices that were hardware based, having recently transitioned from analog to digital, albeit physical digital (phigital) in many cases.

While these words of wisdom still apply in some cases, its more common that we can derive more value from multifunction devices that are also cross-functional. The iPhone helped usher in the era of devices that incorporate multiple functions. We used to have a dedicated "iPod, phone, and Internet communicator." While it might be nice to have a separate iPod so you don't drain your phone battery listening to music, we've found its easy enough to carry a separate battery charger pack rather than trying to maintain multiple single-function devices.

It's the software that enables this, and in the building industry we're still playing catch up to the 10 year old iPhone's app architecture that offloaded processing to the cloud when appropriate, applied an app ecosystem framework to foster a community of 3rd party app developers that enhanced the phone/os platform, and used API's to connect web and software applications to enrich applications with advanced functionality the developer didn't have to create from scratch.

In commercial buildings, its still commonplace to operate silo'd building systems that don't share information with each other or with enterprise applications. It doesn't have to be like this!! There are tools to give your buildings intelligence. All it takes is a team of visionary, knowledgeable designers and skilled integrators. If you want to understand how to create the smart building of the future, start by understanding how the 10 year old iPhone created such a thriving ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts.