Human-Centered Digital Twins
This participatory research project set out to create the first human-centered Digital Twin for public building use. A powerful tool was designed to help facility managers and occupants ensure both building efficiency and occupant wellbeing through an interactive digital platform.
MA/MSc Project
Role:
Design Research
Year:
2023
The Challenge
Problem
As more Digital Twins (DTs) are implemented into public buildings, there is a rising demand for building occupants to be provided with access to observe and control the interactions in the built environments they inhabit. Human-centric DTs are therefore important to consider in the evolution of this emerging technology.
Objective and Impact
The project aimed to investigate the potential of human-centric DTs in which both occupant comfort and building efficiency co-exist and interact for the benefit of both people and the planet. The effort aids in creating and maintaining low-carbon communities and suggests further study into the use of DTs for long-term education on sustainable behaviours in built environments.
39%
of global carbon emissions originate from buildings.
Digital Twins
are interactive replicas of the physical world powered by the interaction between Building Management Service (BMS) and occupant data.
#11
of the UN Sustainable Development Goals , “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, can be satisfied by employing DTs.
Research Aim
This research aims to investigate how DTs can encourage a feedback loop between FMs and occupants to ensure net-zero carbon buildings and occupant wellbeing. The guiding research question read as follows:
What preferences and behaviours can building occupants contribute in guiding the design of human-centric DTs?
How can building occupants utilise DTs to enhance their comfort in the built environment? And how can FMs utilise DTs to maintain building efficiency?
Do DTs have the ability to facilitate feedback loops between building occupants and the built environment to ensure sustainability?
Participants
Participants were recruited from a class in a higher education institution's School of Design and Environment department. The invitation was shared with the course professor who presented the study and took voluntary sign-ups from his students. A total of 25 students chose to participate aged between 18 and 23 years old. Around 80% of participants were female and 20% were male.
Method
Participatory workshop to extract insights on participants' behaviours and design preferences related to energy awareness and energy-saving measures. Participants role-played as different personas (Students and Facility Managers) to capture discussions (conflicts and similarities) between the personas’ wants and needs.
A thematic analysis was employed to examine transcripts from the workshop. Key themes were identified from the transcripts which were first open-coded individually and then refined when compared across the research team. Codes were synthesised into themes, reviewed, and then further defined based on the thematic analysis. The research findings were found and then further validated by a DT developer to ensure feasibility and impact.
Discussion and Design Principles
This study contributes novel human-centric DT design principles to encourage dialogue between FMs and building occupants in employing sustainability measures while promoting wellbeing. The design principles are considered as follows:
Democratically providing and receiving feedback. DT UI design features must allow occupants to vote on open issues for a limited time until a set number of responses have been reached to democratically addressed issues. FMs review issues and their response depends on building efficiency statuses provided by the DT using real-time data. (i.e. temperature settings, energy consumption, outside temperature, brightness in the room etc.). AI can be utilised to propose an optimal setting that FMs can decide to accept, reject, or modify.
Viewing occupant preferences and responding to requests using real-time data. The feedback loop system built into a DT UI must be responsive to the status of a building. FMs need to make decisions based on occupant needs and energy efficiency considerations which are supplemented by visualisations on the UI. Visualisations should provide knowledge to the FM that is pertinent to the issue at hand including historical data to inform decisions.
Promoting behavioural change towards sustainable behaviours. The DT UI design must include digital nudges to promote sustainable behaviour in occupants as long term exposure to information on sustainability could lead users to conduct themselves in a sustainable manner. When requesting needs that could be detrimental to the building's efficiency, occupants are prompted by the UI to address their comfort in a more energy efficient way to avoid compromising the net-zero carbon emissions of the building.
Limitations The findings should be tested in diverse contexts to improve the generalizability of the design principles. The sample was primarily female and between the ages of 18 to 23 making results challenging to generalise. While this study utilised role-playing techniques to facilitate a discussion between participants, future studies should validate findings with real FMs and other relevant stakeholders, such as building managers.
Second Design Intervention
While all data gathered from the workshop and the previous SME interviews pointed to a design solution that was primarily digital, I noted during my conversations with participants that they had difficulty fully entering a digital world when it came to changing something physically.
Through the research gathered, I still believed users would primarily interact with the DTs through a digital platform, such as the one designed, I felt it necessary to design a solution for the “in-between phase” of digital transformation.
