Innovation Brief chapter 3: Post Pandemic Built Environment
By: Connected Places Catapult
Tags: Infrastructure, Built Envrionment, Coronavirus, Economic Development, Economic Recovery

Horizon 2 — What Next?

Creating safe environments for people to work, shop and play

Speaking at the CityX Connected Places Expo in 2018, Indy Johar, founder of Dark Matter Labs, challenged developers and asset owners to think about optimising the built environment for human wellbeing and productivity, rather than rental income. A similar idea was expressed at last year’s World Built Environment Forum. Participants discussed how to design, build and invest in schemes that have holistic value — in terms of environmental sustainability and the wellbeing of occupiers. This contrasts with treating the built environment as a commodity to generate income.

The advent of COVID-19 and the social distancing it has necessitated looks set to shift the built environment sector towards the future advocated for by Johar — at least in the short term. Preparing workplaces to reopen and bring back employees — in a phased manner in most cases — is now a key priority for many organisations. It is likely that the best approach would balance a mix of remote work and the adaptation of existing spaces and behaviours. This needn’t be viewed as purely mitigation against risk — it could also create improvements: for example, the average commuter spends over 200 hours each year travelling to and from work, often in environments which are bad for their physical and mental health.

“We need to move from a built environment that isolates and reduces wellbeing to one that takes full account of the needs of people.” Nicola Yates OBE, Chief Executive of Connected Places Catapult

Less commuting would create valuable time that could be spent with family and friends, improving health and wellbeing, and in turn their productivity at work.

However, this also reopens the debate on what it means for ‘open plan’ offices that make social distancing in offices much harder. Open offices tend to be cheaper to build, but their role in increasing productivity is often put to question. For the short term, some organisations will consider using plexiglass dividers or other kind of “cough shields” in their open plan offices. But in the longer term, open plan offices will likely see a downtrend.

Over and above changes to workplace design to mitigate the risk of contamination, business leaders will also need to rebuild trust in the health and safety aspects of their premises, a key priority referenced by Kathleen Fontana of Mitie at a RICS webinar in June 2020. As the real estate services firm JLL points out:

“Returning to work means reaching an optimal solution where the trust of people in their employer, their colleagues and their government/state is beyond expectations. The physical transformation of our environments is instrumental in reaching this state and crucial to getting back to work.”

New technologies and services will be needed in order to accommodate people’s changed attitudes towards hygiene, health and safety — representing opportunities for businesses specialising in risk-mitigating solutions. Of particular interest will be solutions related to contactless technologies, behavioural science, and cleansing and air filtration.

Contactless technologies

While use of cash was already waning in many places, COVID-19 has catalysed a further shift towards contactless payments, thanks to social distancing requirements and risk of contamination. Other forms of contactless technology — including voice control, facial recognition, and personal stylus pens to use on shared screens and devices — look set to enjoy a similar boost as workers begin to return to offices and other workplaces.

Pre-COVID, voice control technology was increasingly common in the home, thanks to devices like Google’s home hub and Amazon’s Echo. In the workplace, touch-free technology was limited to sensor-operated automatic doors, toilet flushes and hands-free soap dispensers. Now, as an increasing number of organisations re-assess their hygiene measures, that is expected to change.

“It will only be a matter of time before meeting rooms and communal kitchen areas begin to feature such tech and staff can speak directly to meeting room light controls or display screens.” Akshay Thakur, EMEA Head of Technology Consulting at JLL, May 2020

Hands-free technology that enables employees to avoid contact with frequently ‘touched’ surfaces such as lift buttons, light switches, taps and meeting room booking screens may see more widespread adoption, especially in new builds. Simpler door-opening devices have already found their way to market — including the “hygienehook”, created by London-based designer Steve Brooks. Within a week of his design, four different models of the hook went on sale selling at just under £15 ($18.60) each. UK companies like ultraleap who provide underlying haptic technology are likely to see opportunities to bring more sophisticated applications to market.

In the near term, apps that allow smartphones to be used for entry into buildings and activate lifts will see higher adoption. For instance the Navigator Office Center in Estonian capital Tallinn recently made its building entry systems contactless with smartphone technology allowing tenants to open doors and activate lifts.

Facial recognition, although controversial, is seeing widespread adoption in commercial and residential buildings globally. The access gates to the 22 Bishopsgate building in London uses facial recognition. There are challenges here — standard facial recognition technology struggles when people wear masks — but a Japanese deep-learning powered system has overcome that, ensuring workers do not have to remove masks to be identified upon entering an office or building.

In the longer-term, a larger number of organisations could follow suit or explore other contactless biometric scanners such as palm or vein recognition.

As the real estate services firm JLL points out, the cost and public acceptance of these tech solutions will remain barriers to adoption irrespective of the tools being used. But with COVID-19 driving new behaviours, public perceptions and priorities may shift in favour of these tech solutions. For now, relatively cheaper and easier to implement smartphone or token access solutions offer immediate opportunities.

Although contactless cards and keys are already widely used for secure access to buildings, the need to carry them with oneself all the time render them ‘inconvenient’ as compared to more recent access technologies including facial recognition and smartphones.

Cleansing, ventilation and central air filtration

Smart building technologies are increasingly common — Connected Places Catapult has a whole testbed for them at its London offices. Innovative sensors and systems already track air quality, room utilisation, and the flow of people around a building. Such technology is likely to come into its own as we reopen offices and other shared spaces. Sensing, building information tools and management platforms which can track and help manage cleansing regimes will provide assurance to facilities managers and users alike that Covid-secure hygiene is being maintained.

The effective functioning of ventilation and air filtration is of particular importance. Research by the World Health Organisation has shown that the average European spends up to 90% of their time indoors — in the office, in the car, at school or in the home. Of these environments, only offices usually have any kind of air filtration system in place. Even before the pandemic, air quality experts like Prof Frank Kelly of King’s College London expressed concerns about the health impacts of poor indoor air quality.

As workplaces plan to bring back staff, they will want to demonstrate that they have implemented the highest possible quality of air filtration and cleansing to reduce or eliminate both pre-existing pollution and any airborne COVID-19 droplets. This is therefore an opportunity for providers of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and innovators who can help improve the effectiveness of such systems — for example by using ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) to help deactivate the virus.

All of these technical retro-fit interventions can be complex — for example, adjusting air-conditioning systems to improve filtration is not a simple task. In addition, multiple interventions run the risk of elongating disruption. There is an opportunity therefore for creating a standardised ‘retrofit kit’ which brings together the key elements which can be deployed in a single ‘hit’.

Behavioural science to rebuild trust in physical spaces outside homes

Globally, trust levels in institutions and systems were plunging even pre-COVID. But the onset of COVID has exacerbated this, particularly as doubts over governments’ data and efforts to contain the pandemic continue to soar.

“As resilient leaders seek to shepherd their organizations and stakeholders through the COVID-19 crisis, trust will be critical to the recovery — specifically, four dimensions of trust (physical, emotional, financial, and digital).” Deloitte, April 2020

After months of lockdown restrictions discouraging people from leaving the relative safety of their homes, bringing people back to offices, shops and high streets will require more than simply implementing risk mitigations. It will also require tackling perceptions and building trust among people that the mitigations are effective, and it is safe to return.

Aside from implementing highly visible and effective mitigations, there will therefore be significant need for neuroscience, psychology and behavioural science-based interventions that will help people (especially those on borderline) easily understand and ‘trust’ those mitigations.

Such interventions could include:

Publishing user-defined signifiers of good hygiene, drawing on data from Building Information Management platforms on, for example, the performance of air conditioning and filtration

Using infrared sensors to regularly check body temperature and communicating openly about any infection risks with employees can also help build and restore trust. Some organisations and facilities in China, Japan, and South Korea are already following this approach.

Using visual cues such as feature carpet tiles to suggest the appropriate distance between employees and pathways, or one-way systems.

Using biophilic design that enhances people’s connections with the natural environment by rendering the buildings more natural features. Such a design offers the potential to make physical spaces more pleasant and productive to work in. As this report by Terrapin Bright Green highlights, there is growing evidence that such a design can create measurable, positive impacts of individuals’ health and wellbeing.

While such interventions would help build trust along the physical dimension, leaders will also need to evaluate and rebuild trust across the other three dimensions of trust: emotional, financial, and digital. We discuss some of the elements of digital trust in our chapter on Critical Infrastructure.