When people ask how ‘green’ a building is, we can talk about a LEED rating. Perhaps you’ve reached NetZero or a Living Building.

When someone questions how ready a building is for technology, we refer to the Wired Score.

When we talk about health and productivity, we consult standards of WELL, fitwel, Reset, and other frameworks. 

What about when you read about the “Smartest Building” coming to your market? How would someone measure, define, or quantify that? 

This question is deceptively difficult to answer. Perhaps we simply cultivate all of the building’s features and hope it’s a longer list than the next “Smart Building” we read about? We may ask:

• Is it smart about the way it uses energy?
• Is it smart about the way it enables maintenance staff to be more efficient and productive?
• Is it smart about the way it uses building systems to send occupancy utilization and occupant behavior statistics to real estate and planning departments?
• Is it smart about the way it connects occupants to the building?

An ambitious team composed of developers from Investa, a smart buildings team at Microsoft, and a group of researchers based at the University of Technology Sydney, is taking on the challenge to produce a 1.0 version of a rating system due by the end of 2019.

Their vision utilizes a points-based system to designate facility ratings and serves as a tool for organizations and project teams to agree on a framework and priority set throughout the development lifecycle.

Stay tuned to the Intelligent Buildings Index at IB-Index.org.